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Public school students in the Washington D.C. area showed marked improvements in academic achievement due to the bold education reforms pursued by D.C. Public Schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, a second-generation Korean American who assumed the post in January of last year, according to the Washington Post. The ratio of elementary school students who achieved proficiency in math rose from 29 percent last year to 40 percent this year, while in reading comprehension the ratio rose from 38 percent to 46 percent over the same period. The ratio of middle and high school students who achieved proficiency in math rose from 27 percent to 36 percent, while in reading comprehension the ratio rose from 30 percent to 39 percent. Upon taking office, Rhee consolidated 23 public schools with low academic achievement levels and replaced 30 percent of school principals. She is pushing a performance-based pay system where salaries for teachers could more than double depending on their achievements. Such are the changes a determined education chief can bring about.
Candidate registrations end today for the vote to choose the next superintendent of education for Seoul, while campaigning begins Thursday. The results of this vote are likely to determine the future direction of Korea's education policy. The upcoming vote is the first direct election to be held since the government's April 15 step to grant more autonomy to individual schools, which transfers important powers regarding education policy to the superintendent. Central and regional governments alike are paying close attention to the results of the vote in order to gauge what the public wants in terms of education policy.
Chancellor Rhee's philosophy is that the realization of the educational potential of children depends on how diligently and efficiently teachers teach them. The success or failure of our education system also depend on how hard our schools and teachers work.
The candidate for Seoul education superintendent who is running on the ticket of the leftwing Korean Teachers and Education Workers' Union is the only one who is against a system of teacher performance evaluation. That candidate supports the KTEWU's stance that such evaluations would stoke competition among teachers, creating a cut-throat atmosphere. That candidate also opposes the idea of having students choose which schools they want to attend and of schools revealing their academic achievement levels. But in order to save our schools from being carried away by efforts to make all schools uniform and face lowered education standards in the process, we must let students and parents choose which high schools they want to attend and promote competition among teachers by letting everyone know which schools excel and which lag behind. Among this candidate's campaign pledges is a proposal to let both teachers and parents choose school principals. That candidate is actually trying to get teachers to select principals. And any principal chosen by teachers would have a difficult time cracking down on those teachers to see whether they are doing their jobs properly.
Voters should head to polling stations with a clear idea of which candidates will drive teachers to work harder and get them to become more creative in the way they teach.
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