Korea's Cram Schools Crackdown

...Hello all, I'm in Tokyo helping my newspaper to cover the earthquake and its aftermath, but I wanted to share a story I wrote from Korea! It ran in the Washington Post today.

Here's a taste:

By the numbers, the South Korean system is the envy of the world: The nation regularly places among the top five countries on international math and reading tests, the high school dropout rate is less than 4 percent, and the college completion rate among young adults — at 56 percent — is among the highest in the world.


But many South Koreans say praise for those achievements often overlooks where the gains come from and at what cost. South Koreans poured $19 billion into private tutoring in 2009, more than half the sum spent on public education. That paid for a range of lessons, including English tutoring, accelerated math classes and endless college exam preparation.

Megastudy Millionaire Turns Education Reformer

Lee Beom is not your typical bureaucrat. He brings home a regular salary from his job as a policy advisor at Seoul's Metropolitan Office of Education, but has millions stashed away in the bank. And he trained for his government job not by passing a civil service exam, but by rising to the top of the cram school industry that the government is now trying to reform.

In the 1990's, as a PhD candidate at Seoul National University and a degree holder from a top science high school, he was a prime recruit for the cram schools in Daechi-dong, Seoul's most notorious cram school ghetto.  He started tutoring middle school students in science a couple days a week and then moved on to preparing high school students for the college entrance exam. He became a star in the test prep industry, tutoring every night and all weekend, reaching thousands of students.

"My income was so huge," he said in an interview. "For five consecutive years, I made more than one million dollars."

Nearly 3 million students were "members" of
Megastudy and downloaded lessons in 2009

Around 2000, he helped collaborate on the launch of a new on-line cram school that would bring the best tutors in Daechi-dong to students throughout South Korea for a third of the cost. Megastudy.net was an instant success, and his lectures soon were being downloaded tens of thousands of times.

He and his wife -- another Daechi-dong tutor  -- bought a four-bedroom house with a yard, a rare luxury in this city of skyscrapers, and they started a family.

Over time, though, the shine of his cram school fame tarnished. "I began to hate my job," he said. The tutors he worked with vied intensely for students, and he recalled that some colleagues paid people to write nasty comments about his classes. And as he got closer to some students, he saw how stressed out they were. "I realized the education system was ruining a lot of students - not just low performers but high performers, too."

He quit his job in 2003. A year later, Megastudy went public and he made more than $15 million, he said.

Seoul’s liberal superintendent

Kwak No Hyun.  The Korea Herald.

Since taking the reigns of the country’s largest school system last year, Kwak No Hyun has ignited controversy over a ban on corporal punishment and a plan to offer free lunches to elementary school children, a strategy the Seoul Mayor calls “nation-destroying populism.”  He has also proposed ending school regulations on students hair styles and clothes. 

Kwak, a human rights activist and lawyer, replaced the more conservative Kong Jung Tack, who was removed from office and imprisoned for accepting bribes. In one of the first popular elections for superintendent in South Korea, Kwak ran on a campaign pledge to 'send corrupt education to jail and send old education to the museum.'

I sat down to talk with him just before the lunar new year, and I asked him about his ideas for reforming schools. Here is a short transcript adapted from our conversation:

Why did you run for superintendent? 

If you want to see or imagine what Korean society will be like in 20 years, then you must look at what is happening in the classroom today. If you find democracy and human rights in the classroom then you can see a Korean society 20 years later that will respect  these things. But I could not see this in today’s classrooms.

Too many students are abandoned..not in the literal sense but in a substantive way. Students, especially those who do not perform well in their studies, are abandoned in the sense that their needs are not cared for... Suppose you are very strong athlete in sports or in art or in drama, then your interests are not respected in school, which is driven by the competition for the top universities, because the SAT does not test any knowledge of drama or sport or art.

There are 1,300 schools in Seoul and huge differences in educational opportunities among schools in the wealthier and poorer neighborhoods. Public education should work for reducing the disparity between parental economic power. But in order to do that, we have to mobilize all the means within in our reach. Otherwise, economic and social bi-polarization will continue.

Why did you decide to ban corporal punishment?

Corporal punishment is not allowed in prisons or in the army.  But in the name of the ‘rod of love,’ it's allowed in schools. I don’t buy that.

Corporal punishment is a very easy way to control students. In most cases, it’s imposed with anger on the part of teachers. And I think in most cases where corporal punishment is committed, students have low regard for their teachers.  

South Korea and the State of the Union

Once again, South Korea's education system got a nice shout out from President Barack Obama.


The reform-minded president has been known to wax poetic about Korea's longer school day and parents' dedication to education. In the annual State of the Union address Tuesday night, he added the prestige of the teaching profession to South Korea's list of academic advantages. 


"In South Korea's teachers are known as nation builders," he said, urging Americans to treat their teachers with the same respect. 


I think it's true that teachers have been seen this way - in so much as the education system has a whole has been the backbone of building the country's economy over the past 60 years and its identity as a distinct democratic and capitalist country once it separated from North Korea.


But the identity of teachers is getting more complicated in a developed South Korea, where wealth is abundant and children aspire to be chief executives or movie stars and where many say they respect their cram school teachers even more. More on that here. 


Other edu-excerpts from the speech:


China is not waiting to revamp its economy. Germany is not waiting. India is not waiting. These nations -- they're not standing still. These nations aren't playing for second place. They're putting more emphasis on math and science. They're rebuilding their infrastructure. They're making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs. Well, I do not accept second place for the United States of America.