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South Korea targets private 'cram schools,' citing heavy burden on families

Ohanian Comment: After glancing at this article, I posted it in Good News. But the more I read, the grimmer the story became and so I had to relocate it. I offer up what I learned on my visit with Korean educators and students. And I entreat NCTE once again to return to their pedagogical roots.

There is a little bit of Good News. South Korean officials don't want kids kept in school past 10 p.m so patrols wander the streets looking for illegal cramming.

What a hoot! Michelle Rhee's brother owned a cram school in Korea. But apparently he didn't cram kids hard enough and it folded. Not to worry: He's got another gig.

One can wonder if there's any chance of President Obama 'getting' this message. Certainly it amounts to a whole lot more than offering up reassurance that he likes the way his daughters are treated at Sidwell Friends. In February 2010, Obama invited governors, decked out in tuxedos and gowns, to dinner at the White House and regaled them with his plan to yoke education to America's economic competitiveness in a tough global marketplace, i.e., a stump speech for the Common Core Standards.



[Obama] said the depth of the competition was brought home to him during a visit to South Korea last year, when he was told of that country's determination to educate its children to out-compete American children.

"That's what we're up against," Mr. Obama said. "That's what's at stake -- nothing less than our primacy in the world. As I said at the State of the Union address, I do not accept a United States of America that’s second-place."




As I pointed out last year, I also went to Korea, invited, not by corporate politicos, but by the Korean Teachers & Educational Worker's Union and the Solidarity for National Movements for Educational Welfare.

One of the KTU conference organizers contacted the NEA, asking if they would recommend someone to speak against NCLB. When NEA chose not to respond, the KTU contacted me.

Conferences organizers asked me to talk about the damage done by No Child Left Behind, and so I titled my speech "Rejecting the Big Business Imperative and Speaking out for Students' Right to Learn: A Critical Review of NCLB." I told them about the work of the Educator Roundtable, our unions' refusal to support the petition ending NCLB, and the Business Roundtable's longtime push to standardize our schools.

I shared the podium with Peter Johnson, President of the Finnish Principals Association, who gave a view of national education policy in sharp contrast with President Obama's corporate scheme, pointing out that the Finnish education system was highly centralized before the great reforms in the 1970s. "Schools were strictly regulated by the central agencies; a dense network of instructions regulated the daily work of teachers. The gradual shift towards trusting schools and teachers began in the 1980s.” In the early 1990s, "the era of a trust-based school culture formally started in Finland." Now, Johnson pointed out, while the global trend is for standardization, Finland emphasizes flexibility and what he called "loose standards."

Martin also pointed out that while the global trend is for Basic knowledge and skills in reading, writing, mathematics and natural science as prime targets of education reform, Finland chooses to pursue expansive learning combined with creativity: Teaching and learning focus on deep and broad learning giving equal value to all aspects of an individual’s growth of personality, moral, creativity, knowledge and skills.

During my stay in Korea I visited a variety of schools and saw everything from kindergartens filled with the kind of play house items that once filled our own kindergartens, to third graders learning the intricacies of the tea ceremony, to students in an alternative school running a coffee shop. I also visited a middle school where students eat dinner at school so they can return to their study carrels and study for very high stakes competitive exams until 10 p.m. or later. It is this sort of pressure chamber imperative the KTU is fighting against.

President Obama seems set on outdoing the Koreans and molding our schools, starting in pre-K, to that image of 12-year-olds hunched over their books at 11 p.m. Certainly, Bill Gates and Eli Broad are ripe for helping him out.

If there were any corporate-politico shame regarding education policy, President Obama would not employ the stock phrase "college-ready and career-ready." Of course no one knows just what "career-ready" means. It's just stuck in there to placate the people who would rightly argue that not everybody needs to be college-ready. If truth be told, not even half the students in high school should go to college. I say this for a variety of reasons, but for those whose eye is on the paycheck, I'd just say examine the projections of the Bureau of Labor: We don't have now--and won't have in the future-- enough jobs for all those people with college degrees, and young graduates with heavy debts to pay off are pretty ticked off to find themselves delivering pizzas.

New York Times reporters write that the common standards in math and reading, coordinated by the National Governors Association "was a bipartisan project at variance with the highly polarized political mood in Washington." They fail to note that this was a unilateral policy leaving out teachers, students, and parents.

Let's organize rallies outside every governor's office in the land, wherein the gathered protesters read As I Lay Dying (one of the exemplar Common Core texts) aloud. Actually, it would be instructive to read it at newspaper offices too, where the editorialists love to write about students' duty to the global economy. And at your local state education department After all, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) is complicit in this Common Core Standards debacle. This organization represents the chief school officer in each state. Ask yours what the hell they're thinking of (and don't forget to poll them on who's the most reliable narrator in As I Lay Dying.)

Tell the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association to stop scrambling for proffered seats at the flimsy tables with corporate politicos set up by their lobbyists in Washington, D. C.; tell them to stand up for professionalism, which means respecting teacher savvy and individual student need. If you belong to these organizations, YOU are paying for those lobbyists, which means YOU are paying to put As I Lay Dying and Pride and Prejudice on the required reading list of every 11th grader in the land.

And worse.

President Obama's hot air on education is both disingenuous and dangerous. Isn't it way past time that the so-called education progressives break their silence and call him on it?

And isn't it way past time that the rest of us call out the so-called education progressives who have chosen to remain silent?


By Michael Alison Chandler

SEOUL — At the headquarters of one of the world's highest-performing education systems, officials are policing after-hours study haunts with names like Kid's College and Math Camp. They field tips from a watchdog Web site that reports tutors who charge too much or work past a 10 p.m. curfew, and forward them to investigators who comb streets in neon-lit neighborhoods where students still in school uniforms remain at their desks deep into the night.

The crackdown on South Korea's "cram schools” is part of President Lee Myung-bak's effort to wrest control back from a frenzied private tutoring industry that enrolls three-quarters of Korean students, the highest rate in the world. He hopes to restore confidence in the country’s education system and reduce the financial and emotional burden on families.

One of South Korea's strengths is the willingness of its parents to invest in their children's education, said Lee Ju Ho, minister of education. "But that energy has been spent on raising test scores, not nurturing creativity or any other aspect of human nature," he said in an interview.

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.

The academic intensity that fueled the country's economic rise is now blamed for a high suicide rate and a plummeting birth rate, as prospective parents weigh the costs of educating children. Extreme competition has also inspired a student exodus to foreign schools and universities that drains talent and divides families.

Shadow education

The nation's ubiquitous private academies, known as hagwons, include richly decorated franchises, mom-and-pop establishments with six chairs, celebrity-taught online lessons and illegal after-midnight tutoring centers.

"Shadow" education is common throughout East Asia and increasing elsewhere, a response, in part, to the growing use of tests to compare students, schools and countries, said Mark Bray, a professor at the University of Hong Kong who studies private tutoring. In the United States, the industry is worth between $5 billion and $7 billion, according to EduVentures, a research firm.

But South Korea leads the world in private tutoring. "In Korea, you can't afford to opt out," Bray said. The average Korean family spent nearly 20 percent of its income on private tutoring, according to a 2007 report by the Hyundai Research Institute, a think tank.

Kim Hee-Jeong lives in Mok-dong, an affluent Seoul neighborhood, and spends about $1,000 a month for 20 hours a week of private lessons for her third-grade son in English, math and science, not including his football, in-line skating, piano, violin and Chinese classes. Kim worries that he will burn out from being "much too busy from a young age." But he is far ahead of his public school lessons, she said, and classes are too big for personal attention.

The government has tried repeatedly, with little success, to regulate private tutoring, including an outright ban in the 1980s which was gradually overturned. Cram-school spending dipped slightly in 2010; the Education Ministry is crediting its new policies.

The cornerstone of the reforms is an ambitious, long-term shift away from a test-dominated college admission system. The Education Ministry has begun funding admissions officers at top universities and training them in a U.S.-style process that also considers talents, creativity and independent learning.

There are also some high-profile local efforts underway, including a 10 p.m. cram-school curfew in Seoul. To help enforce the regulations, the Education Ministry set up a watchdog center, offering cash rewards to tipsters.

Go In-Gyung, chairman of Pagoda, which prepares college students and professionals for English tests, says the government "is making everyone settle for lower quality."

'A waste of money'

Hoping to boost confidence in public education, the government introduced a controversial teacher evaluation system as well as standardized tests meant to stir competition among schools. It is also offering more after-school tutoring at public schools and on TV.

Last year the Education Ministry decided that 70 percent of questions on the national college entrance exam would be based on lessons carried on the government-funded Educational Broadcasting System, providing a strong incentive for students to tune in.

One of EBS's on-air personalities is Brian Rhee, whose sister, Michelle Rhee, the former D.C. schools chancellor, became the face of U.S. education reform.

The 39-year-old Korean American moved to his parents' home town more than a decade ago to learn Korean and pursue an acting career. Along the way, he found steady work as an English teacher.

In 2008, he opened his own cram school and encouraged parents to think beyond the next test, to skills their children will need for a globalized world. And while many academies assign three-page vocabulary lists, he gave students a half-dozen words to practice. "I wanted to take some of the pressure off these kids,” he said. But parents doubted his approach and he closed the doors last spring.

Yang Geong Cheol, a factory manager and a father of two in Gumi, an industrial city south of Seoul, paid for his older daughter's late-night cram-school classes for six years, but she didn't get into elite colleges. "It was a waste of money," he said.

His younger daughter studies mostly on her own and would like to see the new college admissions system make it easier to compete with students who hire top tutors.

"My hope is that one day public education will be enough," he said.

— Michael Alison Chandler, with comment by Susan Ohanian
Washington Post
2011-04-04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/s-korea-tries-to-wrest-control-from-booming-private-tutoring-industry/2011/01/12/AFNXQfXC_print.html

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