ABSTRACT
As the two passages above illustrate, MOEC officials and classroom teachers are embedded in contexts that share few commonalities. Contrasts in the physical environments point to fundamental differences in the ways that national and local actors involved in education construct their professional lives. Though both groups are employed by the same branch of government, they are guided by distinct values and visions of what they can accomplish in the workplace. In many respects, MOEC employees stationed in Jakarta share more with individuals located at parallel levels of other ministries than the teachers who follow their direction. One MOEC official observed that, “Here at the MOEC we have two streams: the bureaucrats and the functionaries.”1 Rarely do the two streams intersect. As I will show, that lack of shared experience has created a fissure that widens steadily the more closely we study implementation of the LCC.
