Identifying the Level of Schools’ Readiness towards the Implementation of Merdeka Curriculum in Medan Petisah District

Readiness is one of the indicators in the evaluation area to judge a context’s condition to what extent they will succeed in the practicing of a new curriculum or anything else. The readiness indicator in this research includes teachers’ understanding about the details of the new curriculum, lesson planning design, learning process, module development to support the learning process, infrastructures, and evaluation process. This research aims to evaluate the schools’ readiness in the application of Merdeka Curriculum. There are fourteen kindergartens with both national and religious backgrounds located in Medan Petisah district that participated in this research. The research was undertaken in May to June 2023 by inviting two representatives, both a teacher and a headmaster of the schools involved in this research. The data were analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative methods. The analysis results show that only one school is identified in the level of strongly ready to implement the new curriculum in their institution with their good understanding of the curriculum details and how to run the school under the implementation of Merdeka curriculum. Approximately the overall score says that the schools in the Petisah district are moderately seen to be ready to implement the curriculum. Teachers’ understanding about the details of the curriculum, learning designs, and students’ development evaluation appear to be concerning.