Fulbright U.S. Education Center

Today’s Joongang Daily has an interesting article summarizing the results of a recent study by the Korean Educational Development Institute (KEDI).  KEDI surveyed 6,600 students at 116 high schools across the country who also attend a hagwon (private institute) and asked them to rate hagwon and public school teachers in fourteen different dimensions.  Students were asked, for example, if they were satisfied with teachers, how much teachers were devoted to teaching, how well teachers were prepared for class, and so forth.

The ratings showed that students gave higher scores to hagwon teachers for preparing them for college entrance exams, and for trying to maintain closeness with students.  Some school teachers complained about the results of KEDI’s research, suggesting it was not appropriate to compare hagwon and public school teachers since their purposes were different.

The Korea Times is carrying a series of articles on private tutoring in South Korea.  Today’s article focuses on the difficulty of enforcing laws against such tutoring.   According to an official at the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, “It is hard to control tutoring due to privacy matters, especially when it comes to foreigners.  Moreover, many of those who seek out such tutoring are well connected, leaving little room for authorities to uncover their illegal transactions.”

Reportedly, no foreign tutors have been caught by the authorities for violation of the Private Education law.

The recent scandal affecting SAT testing in Korea has taken a new twist with reports that at least one much sought after SAT instructor was kidnapped and beaten after he tried leaving his private academy for another one.  According to a report in the Joongang Daily, police say that he reported being taken against his will to a villa in Gyeonggi and threatened after he tried to leave the academy last December.   Several private institutes tutoring for the SAT in southern Seoul are reportedly engaged in overheated competition for top lecturers in order to attract as many students as possible.

The Korea Times today published an interview with Vice Minister of Education Lee Ju Ho, that provides a good overview of the current administration’s education policy.  It’s goal, as the headline proclaimed, was to keep Hagwons (private institutes) at bay.  The Vice Minister was quoted as saying “Simply put, our goals are to enable students to be home by 10 P.M. rather than in cram schools, and to help them become rational thinkers rather than receptacles of rote knowledge.”   Lee, who holds a Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University is considered one of the architects of the Lee Myung Bak administration’s education policy and now leads its day-to-day operations.

The administrations reform measures are being implemented in three steps.

• First, colleges and universities are being given greater discretion in selecting new students, allowing them to decide how much to weigh the college scholastic ability (CSAT) test scores.
• This is to be followed by a reduction in the number of subjects tested on the CSAT.
• The third and final step allows schools full authority in student selection through admissions officers.

The government’s reform efforts are viewed as a remedy for the “education fever” that many people think may negatively affect the country’s future.  Currently, hagwons in Seoul are barred from offering classes after 10:00 P.M.  That ban is set to spread to the rest of the country after the Constitutional Court’s rejection of a petition against the ban.  Also, the cram schools are being closely monitored to see whether they are following guidelines on fees.  South Korea leads the world in expenditures per capita on private lessons, spending about $30 billion per year on them.

Some days ago the press reported a scandal in which a Korean language institute instructor was arrested by police after providing copies of an SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) test taken in Bangkok, Thailand,  via e-mail to Korean students who were to take the same test hours later in the United States.  Now The Korea Times is reporting that four more Koreans have been apprehended for attempting to leak SAT information.   Reportedly, police are widening their investigation, in cooperation with the U.S.-based Educational Testing Service, the administrator of the SAT, to check whether the four in question had previously leaked papers to “clients” at home and abroad utilizing time zone differences.

According to the Suseo police department in southern Seoul, the four –including a 36 year old SAT preparation instructor–were suspected of leaking exam sheets they obtained from a high school in Gapyeong, Gyeonggi Province, where the SAT test was administered last Saturday.

The SAT scandal is a lead item on Korean television news these days and is in all the newspapers.  For further detail, you may wish to read the Joongang Daily’s account of the latest developments.

An article appeared in the Korea Times yesterday that illustrates the high profile and potentially controversial nature of English testing in South Korea.  The article deals with an ETS Korea scholarship program that selected eight high school students as “ETS Ambassadors.”

The article notes that the ETS promotion comes at a time when foreign language high schools in Korea have dropped TOEFL requirements.  I might add that the general context for this article involves the important question of whether or not TOEFL is an appropriate test for middle school and high school students, many of whom have been taking it in recent years, for lack of an alternative.

According to an article in the Chosun Ilbo today, eight out of ten salaried workers think they are underpaid because of their poor English skills.  In the survey of almost 1,500 employed workers conducted by a jobs site, 89.9 percent of respondents said that if they had a better command of English they would be better paid.

When asked what they would do if they had a better command of English, most said transfer to a larger firm (54.4 percent), followed by working in another field (20.4 percent), negotiating their salary (13.3 percent) and leaving the company to found their own business (7.8 percent).

As reported in the Korea Times, it’s easy to spot the neatly dressed kindergarteners hopping out of BMWs and Maseratis in front of the southern Seoul campus of British International Pre School (BIPS), a prestigious English-speaking kindergarten rumored to be most sought-after by the rich moms in town.

The school’s annual tuition hovers above 18 million won ($14,400) ― more than four times the tuition for public universities ― but money doesn’t seem to be the problem. It’s the competition rate.  One mother who failed to get her six-year-old son into the program says she felt defeated when she had to enroll her child in a regular neighborhood kindergarten, which typically charges 200,000 won to 400,000 won per month.

BIPS, Bambini and some 20 other English-speaking “premium” kindergartens claim to provide only the best and charge anywhere from 1.5 million to 2 million won per month.

As reported in The Korea Times, a total of 457 elementary and secondary schools across the nation have been selected as schools that will attempt to free their students from private tutoring. To do this through upgrading curricula and other programs, the schools will receive subsidies from the government.  According to the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, about 1,000 schools had applied for the subsidy program.

The selected schools will receive an average of 130 million won ($102,000) per year ― the government plans to spend about 60 billion won on the project this year.

The “private tutoring-free schools” are expected to run tailor-made programs or after-school classes with the special budget as well as hire more teachers.

The schools are obliged to regularly survey private cram school costs of their students and report it to the ministry. Those who fail to reduce private education costs will no longer be entitled to the subsidies.

As covered by the Joongang Ilbo and other local media today,  private education institutes, or hagwon, will be banned from providing classes after 10 p.m. from today, and whistleblowers will be rewarded with cash payments.   This was announced yesterday by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology.  An individual who reports on illegal hagwon operations will be rewarded with a maximum of 2 million won ($1,577) in total.

This measure is unprecedented, although past administrations have spent decades trying to clamp down on private education fever in South Korea.  According to the Education Ministry, education offices in each city and province will accept reports on illegal practices of hagwon. The Ministry will also install a call center for the same function.   To help ensure the effectiveness of these measures, the Ministry will hire 200 workers devoted soley to the task of cracking down on illegal hagwon operations.  The assumption is that parents who are dissatisfied with the operations or tuition fees of a particular hagwon will make up the majority of those who report violations of the new policy.