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.  

Down With the College Entrance Exam?

A grueling national exam has long been the key gatekeeper to college in Korea. High school students spend nearly every waking hour cramming for it, taking practice test after practice test.

But the ministry of education wants to phase it out and replace it with an American-style process, one that considers talent, passion and independent thinking. Leaders say they want to nurture creativity and innovation, not just endurance and memorization. And they want to limit the soaring demand for private tutoring.

Sound radical? Sound...Un-Korean?  Possibly. The testing culture here goes back hundreds of years, and undoing it is going to be hard.  I wrote a story about how this nascent change is going in South Korea. Check it out!

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. 

Martin Luther King Day from the Hermit Kingdom

It's interesting to reflect on the American Civil Rights legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr this year from the Hermit Kingdom, where the vast majority of people are the same race and speak the same language and have a shared history that goes back hundreds of years. 

The population in South Korea is beginning to diversify, as the birth rate plummets and migrant workers come in from other Asian countries to fill factory and agricultural jobs. There is a wave of English teachers and business people, and of course military.  But white faces like mine are still rare in some parts of South Korea; Black faces are more rare. 

In such a homogenous country, education plays an enormous role in differentiating people and setting their place on the social ladder. After the Joseon Dynasty lost power and the Japanese occupation ended, a social system that concentrated power among a small number of royalty, scholars and elites was flattened. Nearly everyone was left destitute by the Korean War, and education is what brought people wealth and success in the coming generations. This could help illustrate why academic striving is so intense here.

At first, the system was heralded as a true meritocracy -- whoever studied hard enough and performed best on the college exam or the civil service exam got in. But now, many fear that the resulting class system is simply reproducing itself, with the wealthiest parents providing the best tutors and opportunities for their kids. Today government officials in Korea fret about a class-based achievement gap the way Americans talk about the gap in school performance between different races or ethnicities.

South Korea's Abandoned Rural Schools

Some estimates put the population of greater Seoul at 23 million, nearly half of South Korea's population. And while only three in ten people lived in or around a city fifty years ago, the ratio is closer to 9 out of 10 today.

Sangri Elementary

Mass migration to cities has left a string of abandoned or nearly-abandoned schools in the countryside. I visited one such school a few weeks ago.  Sangri Elementary is in a mountain-top village outside of Yecheon in a farming area known for apple orchards and garlic fields.

This school had 13 students - thirteen - down from a high of 160 a few decades ago. And while thousands of schools with similarly dwindling enrollments have closed, this one - and many more - have stayed open, propped up by national government support.

Kindergarten class at Sangri

Sangri has a nearly 1:1 staff to student ratio. Field trips and free lunches. A fully stocked computer lab and huge flat screens in each classroom. Itinerant art and music teachers. Native English teachers who visit the school or give live web-cast lessons from the Philippines every day. And while public school doesn't typically start until first grade, kindergarten is offered on site for free.

I was stunned to see resources like this flowing into such a small school, particularly in a country where class sizes of 40 are still common. It's the most compelling evidence I've seen of the Korean government's commitment to equity.

Korean Education - Praised the World Over But in Need of Reform

This year is the 60th anniversary of the US-Korea Fulbright program. If you're not familiar with Fulbright, it is an international exchange program for scholars of many stripes. The US government and its partners in more than 150 countries fund research in the arts and sciences, at universities and all manner of non-governmental organizations.  It's the reason I'm in Korea.

At a dinner commemorating the anniversary this fall, South Korea's former Minister of Education Ahn Byong Man gave a keynote address that sums up the highs and lows of Korean education today. 

He said: During the more than two years I served as Minister of Education, Science and Technology... I could not help feeling astonished that the entire world seemed to be taking note of South Korea's education system and showering lavish praise on it. At the same time, I could not conceal my bewilderment at the fact that within South Korea, that same education system is subject to constant criticism as the nation's biggest problem. 

I got a copy of the full speech, so I could share it with you. 

**By the way, this is the first time I've tried this web site for posting document on-line. If you'd like to read the speech without having on-line dating advertisements flashing at you, just click "full screen" ;-)

Obama's South Korea-isms

A headline in the Korea Times last August declared that Korea is a "Large Part of Obama's Vocabulary." After analyzing 18 months worth of speeches, the Times found that South Korea "appeared in more than one in 10 key speeches" that the president had given since taking office.

Lee Myung-Bak and Barack Obama
at the White House June 2009

Indeed, the leader of the free world does seem to drop the name "South Korea" regularly, and often in admiring tones. The country's rapid economic rise is a favorite subject; its education system is also near the tip of his tongue.

When advocating for a longer school day, Obama pointed out that Koreans spend more than a month longer in school every year, and when talking about international competition, he often mentions this conversation he had with Korean Pres. Lee Myung-Bak, shortly after he took office.

When I visited South Korea last year—and I've told this story before—I had lunch with President Lee, and I asked him, "What's your biggest education challenge?" And he said, "My biggest issue, my toughest fight is that Korean parents are too demanding. They want their kids to learn English in first grade, and so I've had to ship in a whole bunch of foreign-speaking teachers to meet the demand." They want their students learning everything—math, science, foreign languages—all as soon as possible.