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The Education Ministry is piloting teacher evaluations in 48 schools across the country starting in the middle of this month. The Korea Teachers and Educational Workers Union (KTU) is threatening to fight the entire scheme by way of industrial action and campaign for the education minister¡¯s ouster.
Already the evaluation system the ministry will implement is significantly moderated from its original plan. First, teachers will mainly evaluate one another, while parents and students are relegated to one or two questionnaires a year. Parents are not even allowed to give their opinions of individual teachers: they are merely to be asked if their children are satisfied with their school life. Under the original plan, by contrast, they would have observed classes and assessed teachers. In short, the immediate consumers of education are to be little more than bystanders.
The sole purpose of the evaluations will be to inform individual teachers how they are doing, so they can reflect and improve their performance, and the KTU insists even principals must be kept from seeing the results. In consultations, the teacher organizations extracted a promise from the ministry that the records will not be used in personnel decisions. All students and parents can hope for, then, is that the teachers really do reflect on their results.
Yet watered-down though this is to the point of constituting no evaluation at all, the KTU will not stand for it unless the current duty assessment is abolished too. Under that system, teachers are evaluated by principals and vice principals, and the scores are reflected in promotion. On top of that, the KTU won¡¯t even have school administrators sitting on the school committees that will decide the methods of evaluation.
Yet if the evaluations are to have no impact on a teacher¡¯s career while the duty assessment is scrapped, there will of course be no way left to reward competent and sincere teachers for doing a good job. Next, the KTU wants teachers to elect their principals, so it can completely neutralize administrators and grab control of schools itself. Only once that is done will the union at last be free to entrench its vested interests at leisure and go undisturbed about filling the heads of our children with the screaming nonsense that passes for its worldview.
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