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.

Meet Donghwan Park: Months Away from the College Entrance Exam

Donghwan Park next to his book shelf
full of test preparation manuals

Donghwan Park wasn't always a stellar student with a voracious appetite for learning. In middle school, he says, he was just a regular kid. "I played many computer games," he admits. "I watched many animations."

Like many kids, he attended cram schools at night, but he never paid much attention. "I was like a pendulum on a clock. I was learning by inertia," he said.

It wasn't until he reached high school that he had an epiphany.  "I realized I had to change."  He cut his Starcraft CD in half and went on a study abroad program in America, where he was one of a handful of non-white students at a public high school in rural Indiana.

"I lived without video games for 10 months," he said. "It's really a hard habit to break. Sometimes your hands feel shaky."

He came back an English speaker with new confidence and new focus. He started his first year of high school staring straight ahead at a goal of getting into the best college possible. "Three years of high school determine the next 80 years of your life," he said.

Two years later, he has made great strides. He starts the school day at 7:30 in the morning. After his last class at 4 p.m., he stays at school or goes to the public library near his house to study until 10 p.m. or midnight.  Some nights, he goes to another late night study center, that's operated privately, to put in a few more hours. He has memorized whole books of English vocabulary words. Twice a week, he meets with a math tutor.

In S. Korea, it's hard to turn on the steam in the middle of the academic race. It's so competitive to get into top colleges that the best candidates typically have been the top achievers, the hardest workers, all along.

A particularly unforgiving aspect of the system is the way students are graded -- by rank rather than by score.  "In the United States, if I did my best, I could get an A-plus," he said. "Here I have to beat all my friends."

Going Rate for an English Tutor

Going rate for a native-speaking English tutor in Seoul's high-rent districts, according to a mom who just found one, a Dartmouth graduate no less...

50,000 KRW ($45)per hour for one student

60,000 KRW ($54) for blonde female "premium"

500,000 KRW ($446) The cost for the referral agency who found the English tutor

You can specify nationality, gender, hair color, prestige of degree, as well as how much you are willing to pay, in your request.

American Cram School Industry

Private tutoring in South Korea is a $23 billion industry. A huge part of the market is test preparation for the national college entrance exam.  Students spend years, and many spend thousands of dollars, preparing for it.

In the United States, the private test prep market for the SAT and ACT college-entrance exams is much smaller, but growing. The National Association for College Admission Counseling estimated it to be worth as much as $ 4 billion.  Some of the tutoring centers are mom and pops modeled after Indian or Korean cram schools; Others are major companies, such as the Princeton Review or Kaplan, which is owned by the Washington Post Co.

The college counselors' association is concerned that outside-of-school coaching is giving some students unfair advantage in admissions. And it has issued a couple of reports on how the industry is changing and what effect coaching can have on college admissions.

Through extensive research - more than 30 studies over a half century - the report found that coaching provides a 10-20 point boost on the math section of the SAT and a 5-10 point boost in English.  The research is much thinner and less conclusive on the ACT.

While not a huge jump, it's enough to give some students the edge they need, particularly if the college sets a cut-off score or weighs the score heavily in comparison to other activities and achievements, the report found.

Korean Cram Schools - By the Numbers

Cram schools are ubiquitous in South Korea. Known as hagwons, their signs are visible in buildings all over Seoul and throughout the country.  These schools include private english kindergartens, taekwondo and violin lessons, and all manner of academic tutoring and test preparation. They help students get ahead and compete more effectively for the college entrance exam and english-proficiency exams that are important gatekeepers for higher education and eventually good jobs.

The Ministry of Education, which maintains data on the private education industry, sent me these numbers:

What percentage of students go to private academies?  Participation rate was 75 percent in 2009, down from 77 percent in 2007.

Number of registered cram schools nationwide 

2005  71,447 (5.7 percent - increase over year before)

2006  74,493 (4.3)

2007  77,284 (3.7)

2008  79,898 (3.4)

2009  83,327 (4.3)

2010  84,123 (1.0)

The number of attendees increased dramatically from about 400,000 in 1980 to 5.4 million in 2010. 

Cram schools are popular throughout East Asia, but Korea is the leading country in terms of participation, said Mark Brady, a professor at the University of Hong Kong who wrote a report for UNESCO on policy responses to private education around the world. He regards the growth of the private tutoring industry - what he calls shadow education -- with caution.

"Tutoring can be a good thing," he said. "It can help low achieving students catch up and it can help high achievers find a way to stretch. But Korean society feels trapped; it can't afford to opt out. If you do, you fall out of the race," he said.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T Find Out What it Means for Korean Teachers

Teachers have long been revered in Korea. Confucian tradition puts teachers in the realm of kings. And competition for new teachers is still very tough, as many see it as an honorable and stable career.

But lately, their status seems to be slipping.  The abolition of corporal punishment in classrooms has sparked debates about how much respect (and obedience) teachers can command in today's society. A series of news stories portray classroom chaos and students assaulting or berating their teachers. One video clip circulated on-line shows a student asking his teacher a series of humiliating questions about her sex life.

Such behavior would have been unthinkable a generation ago, many say. 

"When I was little, teachers were heroes to children," said Go In-Gyung, chairman of Pagoda, an English test preparation company. While so many children once pinned their hopes on a teaching career, he said, "now they are interested in becoming movie stars, chief executives, sports figures."

This generation grew up with money. They did not know what it was like to be hungry like their grandparents did or to share a small apartment with four siblings as their parents may have. They have a whole new sense of entitlement and their career goals extend beyond stability.

If at First You Don't Succeed, Study Study Again

Tens of thousands of Korean high school graduates delay college each year so they can retake the college entrance exam hoping that a better score will carry them to their choice schools.

I met a few such students recently in my own neighborhood in Seoul. I noticed four teenaged boys walking out of a large cram school at lunch time, and I asked them why they were there in the middle of the day, and not in high school. They explained the private academy is specially designed for “study-again students” or jae-soo sang, like them.  They "failed" the first time they took the test last fall, they said, because their scores weren't high enough for top colleges.  

From left: Hoon Lim-Tae, Ji Yong-Chang,
Sun Tae-Mu, Oh Dong-Kwoang

So for the past 10 months they have been engaged in around-the-clock test preparation hoping to gain 30 or 40 points on a 500-point exam. Along with more than 800 other students, they report to the seven-story building every day at 7 a.m. and stay there until 10 p.m., including Saturday. On Sunday, they study from 10 a.m. to 5:40 p.m. 

“Our week is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Friday, Friday," said Ji Yong-Chang,  laughing about his weekend-free year. 

Rules are strict: no dating, no drinking, no noise during self-study time. The goal is maximum focus. The school has a reputation for being “very severe,” Ji said.  That's why his family sought it out from his home town in Taean, southwest of Seoul. He lives in a dormitory down the street.  

Cram School Rush Hour

I met up with some Fairfax County School officials in late October in Daechi-dong, one of the city's famed hot spots for hagwons. The DC-area educators were in town for an education conference and they wanted to see a real "cram school" ghetto during their stay. There are many such neighborhoods in Seoul.

We shivered outside in the dark at 10 p.m. and watched as a virtually deserted sidewalk came alive with crowds of teenagers pouring out from high rise office buildings loaded with tutoring centers. Many wore sweatshirts over their dark blue school uniforms and texted on their smart phones while wandering down the street.

Estimates vary but some show up to 75 percent of students in Korea attend private schools after their regular school day to improve their math or science grades, to learn English, to prep for the college entrance exam.  There are cram schools for sports or violin, for building with legos, for english proficiency exams, for the civil service exam or any exam you can think of.

The government is waging a war against them, trying to crack down on how much money they charge and how late they go. 10 p.m. is cut-off time now; many used to go much later (some still do.)

Here's Fairfax School Board member Ilryong Moon describing the scene.