Pres. Obama, Korea is No Argument for Longer School Hours

"Our children spend over a month less in school than children in South Korea. That is no way to prepare them for a 21st century economy. That is why I’m calling for us not only to expand effective after-school programs, but to rethink the school day to incorporate more time – whether during the summer or through expanded-day programs for children who need it. I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas. Not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom. If they can do that in South Korea, we can do it right here in the United States of America." - President Obama, March 10, 2009 Education Speech

I live in Korea. I've taught in Korea for three years. My wife is Korean, and my in-laws are parents of children in the Korean education system. And I'm here to warn President Obama that Korea is a model to treat with way more skepticism than he shows above.

I'll start with Samuel S. Kim’s doctoral dissertation, “First and Second Generation Conflict in Education of the Asian American Community,” Columbia University, October 2008 (reported in The Korea Times, 10/3/2008). In a nutshell, Kim's research suggests that all that hyper-schooling in Korea does not result in high university performance. On the contrary, Korean students who enter "top" American universities drop out before graduating at the staggering rate of 44%. China and India, with populations 20 times larger than Korea's, post drop-out rates almost half as low: China at 25%, India at 21%. (American drop-out rates at the same colleges were at 34%.)

According to the Korea Times,

Kim said in the thesis that such a high dropout rate is largely attributable to Korean parents forcing their children to study rather than participate in extracurricular activities, an essential part of overseas education for foreign students to acclimate themselves to American society and get a good job in the long run.

According to the thesis, Korean students consume 75 percent of their time available for studying, while they allocate only 25 percent to extracurricular activities such as community service.

In contrast, American students and those from other countries tend to equally share their time for both study and other activities.

He said the Korean mindset regarding education kept Korean students from moving into the American mainstream, citing statistics that of high-ranking officers at World's top 500 enterprises selected by American business magazine Fortune, merely 0.3 percent are Korean, compared with Indians at 10 percent and Chinese with 5 percent.

[Update:] Let me drive the point home: Koreans are so good on international test scores because they work overtime being taught to pass these tests. When they hit the real academic world in college, they don't have the skills necessary to succeed. They're great at acing college admissions tests - that's what their k-12 education emphasizes - but they're America's worst at actually getting through college. And Obama and Duncan are sorely disappointing for not understanding this.

And I'll end with my own observations and readings while living and teaching here in Korea: Korean students are forced to study in "hagwons" - private night- and weekend-classes, and yes, full summer classes too. The overwhelming emphasis is on learning English. As the Vancouver Sun puts it,

[Korea's] spending at home on private education -- mostly to supplement daytime lessons at state school -- dwarfs that of most other countries.

It is common to see children, still in school uniform, in the streets and on public transport late at night after a round of private lessons. Often they will be up by dawn for more.

The Education Ministry estimates that as a percentage of GDP, South Korean parents spend four times more on average on private education than their counterparts in any other major economy.

I see these kids in their school uniforms at midnight outside my apartment, going home after their night classes at the English hagwon down the block. And the funny thing? Koreans spend all this time and money on English, but they don't learn it. They don't speak it to foreigners, they write and read it horribly for all the time invested. A westerner who teaches English at Korean universities blogs about the problem here. I'll just add that most of that study is worksheet-based, scripted, and devoted to passing college examination tests, the SAT, TOEFL, and all the other tests these classes teach to.

So I'll stop there. There's much to support in President Obama's (so-far vague) pronouncements on education in that speech. But the Korean model is not part of that set.