President-elect Lee Myoung-bak's policy proposals threaten education

1. President-elect Lee Myoung-bak has presented his education policies to the media before the National Assembly convenes. Clearly, he is already attempting to direct policy, when the president's office is supposed to follow the direction of the people and their lawmakers. With these policy proposals, he obviously wants to turn the education system into one of competing hagwons, where education operates as a "free market." He intends to erase the one advantage of the CSAT, which is that it allows relatively equal opportunity of access to top universities. High schools are to be ranked by "student performance" levels, and yet more specialist high schools are to be opened.

2. Lee wants students to compete for selection to schools throughout their schooling years, from elementary schools through to universities. At present, students are ranked by schools themselves, and schools are not compared. Lee wants to allow universities to implement their own "ranking criteria" for admissions, such that unversities may soon be examining not only students' elementary and middle school assessments, but the "rank" of the elementary and middle schools that they attended as well!

When universities are given complete freedom in admissions policies, not only will high schools be ranked, but middle and elementary schools will be ranked as well. Soon every school in the country will be in competition. This is not the purpose of an education system.

3. Superintendents plan to implement a national standardized test for middle school students. Soon, education will consist of testing and nothing else. Averages are to be compared, in order to encourage competition among provinces. It is policies like this that Lee supports, and soon superintendents will do anything, even encourage private education, in order to improve these test scores and get themselves re-elected.

4. About the one area that most demands attention from the government, Lee has nothing to say: outside the Seoul-Gyeonggi area, provinces collect 20% less per capita for use in education. Provincial Offices of Education are six trillion won in debt. Lee has refused to address the underfunding of education in the provinces.

5. For Lee, education (and everything else) is business. His plans focus on the appearance of quick results, and they are not up for discussion with stakeholders. If he is allowed to make the radical ideological changes to education that he seeks, Lee will destroy education in Korea. The KTU will not allow this to happen.

2008.02.15
Korean Teachers Union (Jason Thomas)

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