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.  

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."

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!

Korea Tops International Tests (Again)

South Korea was among the highest performing countries in an international standardized test released today.  It took top billing in reading comprehension, third in math and fifth in science in the PISA test.

Finland, Singapore, and Hong Kong were also at or near the top in every subject. The United States, as usual, scored somewhere in the middle. 

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan warned in a statement, "Other high-achieving nations are out-educating and out-competing us" and said the United States needs to "urgently accelerate student learning to remain competitive."  At a televised town hall meeting, he shared the often-told tale about President Obama's lunch with the Korean president who said his biggest education challenge is that Korean parents are too demanding.

In Korea the news was mostly drowned out by the more pressing anticipated results of the annual college entrance exam, an event that warrants a four-page spread in a local newspaper analyzing which scores will lead to acceptance in which colleges.

I talked to Anthony Jackson, vice president for education at the Asia Society, to see why he thought Korea scored so well, along with other East Asian nations (including, for the first time, Mainland China through stellar results in Shanghai).

He said the top scorers tend to have some things in common:

*An emphasis on teacher quality - Hiring teachers from the top of their class, and training them well
*An emphasis on equity -- Making sure that all schools have access to quality teachers

National Test Day

More than 700,000 college hopefuls took the College Scholastic Ability Test this week. In South Korea, Test Day is treated with the reverence and preparations of a national holiday. 

A student who's running late gets
escorted to the 2009 exam. Life.

The government prepares meticulously for minimum distractions.  Airplanes are not allowed to land or take off during the listening portions of the foreign language tests. Many businesses and offices open an hour later to ease morning traffic, and police officers and other emergency personnel have  are often on hand to rush latecomers to their testing centers. 

If you blow your chance, you have to wait another year to take the exam, which is a critical gatekeeper for colleges. 

The exam takes nearly ten hours.  Sections include Korean language, math, English, social studies, science, and a second foreign language. Students usually take the social studies section or the science section.

At the high school in my neighborhood, the gates were closed at 8:30 a.m. and the normally busy street was quiet. About a dozen mothers stood quietly at the fence, not ready to leave just yet.  At some testing sites, underclassman come with tea and posters to cheer on the test takers in the morning.

Producer at EBS, test in hand,
preparing a program that will
review all the answers.

In the afternoon, I visited the Education Broadcasting Service, a public television network that was preparing for a marathon post-test wrap-up program including detailed answers to each question and analysis of how it compared to previous years. 

Later on, I checked in by phone with Oh Dong-Kwoang, who took the test for the second year in a row, after studying at a specialized academy for ten months, at least 12 hours a day.

College Entrance Exam: Hope it "sticks"

The approaching annual college entrance exam is inspiring a wave of consumerism in Korea.  Bakeries and department stores throughout Seoul are full of sweets and gifts for the nervous test takers.  The test is a major rite of passage in Korea and often viewed as a key gatekeeper for competitive colleges and jobs that are deemed crucial to attaining high status or a good pay check.

A Korean friend told me it's traditional to give "yeot" or taffy as a gift, because the sticky sweet is supposed to be good luck. My Korean teacher explained that's because the word for "to stick" and "to pass" is the same.

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.  

Great at Math, But Not Happy About It

South Korea tends to dominate on international math and science exams, competing for top place with the other Asian Tigers. On the 2007 Trends in Mathematics and Science test, Korean eighth graders scored second in math and fourth in science. Americans scored in the middle of the pack - at ninth and eleventh place respectively.

Hansung Science High School in
Seoul  is experimenting with more
creative teaching styles.

But a corresponding survey showed that Koreans lagged in other areas, including self confidence and satisfaction.  Only 38 percent of Korean students said they actually enjoyed learning science and 33 percent said they liked math --- compared to 54 percent and 41 percent of American students. 

Korean students are not alone in their sad state.  The Brown Center on Education Reform published a kind of happiness index in 2006 that mined test data and showed many high performers are similarly disenchanted, while some of the happiest students - in places such as Iran and Botswana - are lagging way behind in skills.

These findings could have implications for happy and sad students alike: In America, classes are designed to be more interesting and exciting, but many students have a strong aversion to memorization-heavy subjects that offer delayed gratification, such as math or foreign language, subjects that pay big dividends in the work place.