South
Korea's students rank among the best in the world, and its top teachers can
make a fortune. Can the U.S. learn from this academic superpower?
Kim
Ki-hoon earns $4 million a year in South Korea, where he is known as a
rock-star teacher—a combination of words not typically heard in the rest of the
world. Mr. Kim has been teaching for over 20 years, all of them in the
country's private, after-school tutoring academies, known as hagwons. Unlike
most teachers across the globe, he is paid according to the demand for his
skills—and he is in high demand.
Seong Joon Cho for The Wall Street Journal.
Kim Ki-Hoon, who
teaches in a private after-school academy, earns most of his money from
students who watch his lectures online. 'The harder I work, the more I make,'
he says. 'I like that.'
Mr.
Kim works about 60 hours a week teaching English, although he spends only three
of those hours giving lectures. His classes are recorded on video, and the
Internet has turned them into commodities, available for purchase online at the
rate of $4 an hour. He spends most of his week responding to students' online
requests for help, developing lesson plans and writing accompanying textbooks
and workbooks (some 200 to date).
I
traveled to South Korea to see what a free market for teaching talent looks
like—one stop in a global tour to discover what the U.S. can learn from the
world's other education superpowers. Thanks in part to such tutoring services,
South Korea has dramatically improved its education system over the past
several decades and now routinely outperforms the U.S. Sixty years ago, most
South Koreans were illiterate; today, South Korean 15-year-olds rank No. 2 in
the world in reading, behind Shanghai. The country now has a 93% high-school
graduation rate, compared with 77% in the U.S.
Tutoring
services are growing all over the globe, from Ireland to Hong Kong and even in
suburban strip malls in California and New Jersey. Sometimes called shadow
education systems, they mirror the mainstream system, offering after-hours
classes in every subject—for a fee. But nowhere have they achieved the market penetration
and sophistication of hagwons in South Korea, where private tutors now
outnumber schoolteachers.
Viewed
up close, this shadow system is both exciting and troubling. It promotes
striving and innovation among students and teachers alike, and it has helped
South Korea become an academic superpower. But it also creates a bidding war
for education, delivering the best services to the richest families, to say
nothing of its psychological toll on students. Under this system, students
essentially go to school twice—once during the day and then again at night at
the tutoring academies. It is a relentless grind.
The
bulk of Mr. Kim's earnings come from the 150,000 kids who watch his lectures
online each year. (Most are high-school students looking to boost their scores
on South Korea's version of the SAT.) He is a brand name, with all the overhead
that such prominence in the market entails. He employs 30 people to help him
manage his teaching empire and runs a publishing company to produce his books.
“In South Korea, 47%
of eighth graders are ranked 'advanced.' In the U.S.: 7%”
To
call this mere tutoring is to understate its scale and sophistication.
Megastudy, the online hagwon that Mr. Kim works for, is listed on the South
Korean stock exchange. (A Megastudy official confirmed Mr. Kim's annual
earnings.) Nearly three of every four South Korean kids participate in the
private market. In 2012, their parents spent more than $17 billion on these
services. That is more than the $15 billion spent by Americans on videogames
that year, according to the NPD Group, a research firm. The South Korean
education market is so profitable that it attracts investments from firms like
Goldman Sachs, the Carlyle Group and A.I.G.
It
was thrilling to meet Mr. Kim—a teacher who earns the kind of money that
professional athletes make in the U.S. An American with his ambition and
abilities might have to become a banker or a lawyer, but in South Korea, he had
become a teacher, and he was rich anyway.
The
idea is seductive: Teaching well is hard, so why not make it lucrative? Even if
American schools will never make teachers millionaires, there are lessons to be
learned from this booming educational bazaar, lessons about how to motivate
teachers, how to captivate parents and students and how to adapt to a changing
world.
South Korean students
prepare to take the standardized exam for college admissions on Nov. 10, 2011.
The country has a 93% high-school graduation rate.
To
find rock-star teachers like Mr. Kim, hagwon directors scour the Internet,
reading parents' reviews and watching teachers' lectures. Competing hagwons
routinely try to poach one another's celebrity tutors. "The really good
teachers are hard to retain—and hard to manage. You need to protect their egos,"
says Lee Chae-yun, who owns a chain of five hagwons in Seoul called Myungin
Academy.
The
most radical difference between traditional schools and hagwons is that
students sign up for specific teachers, so the most respected teachers get the
most students. Mr. Kim has about 120 live, in-person students per lecture, but
a typical teacher's hagwon classes are much smaller. The Korean private market
has reduced education to the one in-school variable that matters most: the
teacher.
It
is about as close to a pure meritocracy as it can be, and just as ruthless. In
hagwons, teachers are free agents. They don't need to be certified. They don't
have benefits or even a guaranteed base salary; their pay is based on their
performance, and most of them work long hours and earn less than public school
teachers.
Performance
evaluations are typically based on how many students sign up for their classes,
their students' test-score growth and satisfaction surveys given to students
and parents. "How passionate is the teacher?" asks one hagwon's
student survey—the results of which determine 60% of the instructor's
evaluation. "How well-prepared is the teacher?" (In 2010, researchers
funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation found classroom-level surveys
like this to be surprisingly reliable and predictive of effective teaching in
the U.S., yet the vast majority of our schools still don't use them.)
"Students
are the customers," Ms. Lee says. To recruit students, hagwons advertise
their results aggressively. They post their graduates' test scores and
university acceptance figures online and outside their entrances on giant
posters. It was startling to see such openness; in the U.S., despite our fetish
for standardized testing, the results remain confusing and hard to interpret
for parents.
Once
students enroll, the hagwon embeds itself in families' lives. Parents get text
messages when their children arrive at the academies each afternoon; then they
get another message relaying students' progress. Two to three times a month, teachers
call home with feedback. Every few months, the head of the hagwon telephones,
too. In South Korea, if parents aren't engaged, that is considered a failure of
the educators, not the family.
If
tutors get low survey marks or attract too few students, they generally get
placed on probation. Each year, Ms. Lee fires about 10% of her instructors. (By
comparison, U.S. schools dismiss about 2% of public school teachers annually
for poor performance.)
All
of this pressure creates real incentives for teachers, at least according to
the kids. In a 2010 survey of 6,600 students at 116 high schools conducted by
the Korean Educational Development Institute, Korean teenagers gave their
hagwon teachers higher scores across the board than their regular schoolteachers:
Hagwon teachers were better prepared, more devoted to teaching and more
respectful of students' opinions, the teenagers said. Interestingly, the hagwon
teachers rated best of all when it came to treating all students fairly,
regardless of the students' academic performance.
Private
tutors are also more likely to experiment with new technology and
nontraditional forms of teaching. In a 2009 book on the subject, University of
Hong Kong professor Mark Bray urged officials to pay attention to the strengths
of the shadow markets, in addition to the perils. "Policy makers and
planners should…ask why parents are willing to invest considerable sums of
money to supplement the schooling received from the mainstream," he
writes. "At least in some cultures, the private tutors are more
adventurous and client-oriented."
But
are students actually learning more in hagwons? That is a surprisingly hard
question to answer. World-wide, the research is mixed, suggesting that the
quality of after-school lessons matters more than the quantity. And price is at
least loosely related to quality, which is precisely the problem. The most
affluent kids can afford one-on-one tutoring with the most popular instructors,
while others attend inferior hagwons with huge class sizes and less reliable
instruction—or after-hours sessions offered free by their public schools. Eight
out of 10 South Korean parents say they feel financial pressure from hagwon
tuition costs. Still, most keep paying the fees, convinced that the more they
pay, the more their children will learn.
For
decades, the South Korean government has been trying to tame the country's
private-education market. Politicians have imposed curfews and all manner of
regulations on hagwons, even going so far as to ban them altogether during the
1980s, when the country was under military rule. Each time the hagwons have
come back stronger.
"The
only solution is to improve public education," says Mr. Kim, the
millionaire teacher, echoing what the country's education minister and dozens
of other Korean educators told me. If parents trusted the system, the theory
goes, they wouldn't resort to paying high fees for extra tutoring.
To
create such trust, Mr. Kim suggests paying public-school teachers significantly
more money according to their performance—as hagwons do. Then the profession
could attract the most skilled, accomplished candidates, and parents would know
that the best teachers were the ones in their children's schools—not in the
strip mall down the street.
Schools
can also build trust by aggressively communicating with parents and students,
the way businesses already do to great effect in the U.S. They could routinely
survey students about their teachers—in ways designed to help teachers improve
and not simply to demoralize them. Principals could make their results far more
transparent, as hagwons do, and demand more rigorous work from students and
parents at home in exchange. And teacher-training programs could become far
more selective and serious, as they are in every high-performing education
system in the world—injecting trust and prestige into the profession before a
teacher even enters the classroom.
No
country has all the answers. But in an information-driven global economy, a few
truths are becoming universal: Children need to know how to think critically in
math, reading and science; they must be driven; and they must learn how to
adapt, since they will be doing it all their lives. These demands require that
schools change, too—or the free market may do it for them.
- Deepak Mashru
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