who has an MA in education, is a U.S.-based education columnist, blogger, and author of ``Awaken Your Birdbrain: Using Creativity to Get What You Want."
wrote in to the Korea Times, and had "Korean Teachers Reach for the SKY" published on the website on the 5th. Give it a read if you want, it's pretty short; here's an excerpt:
Beyond tradition, South Korea actively raises the status of teaching as a profession by doing two things. First, it makes entry into teacher training very selective. Applicants are recruited from the top 5 percent of each high school graduate class. Second, they are paid generous starting salaries of 141 percent of the per capita GDP, which is significantly above the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average of 95 percent.
Making teacher training selective and paying high starting salaries attracts the strongest candidates to the profession, which is important because teacher quality significantly impacts student outcomes.
South Korea is able to pay teachers high starting salaries because it employs relatively fewer than other nations. As a result, the student-teacher ratio in South Korea is 30:1, compared to the OECD average of 17:1.
He really believes in what he writes, or is at least eager for an audience, since he submitted the exact same thing to the JoongAng Daily, and had a shortened version published on the 8th.
If you look at the stats, Korean public school teachers are the second-highest paid in the OECD. Education at a Glance 2008: OECD Briefing Note for South Korea (.pdf file) has some interesting figures, including:
Korea provides comparatively high teacher salaries with steep increases for more experienced teachers. At USD 52 666 for a primary school teacher with minimum training and 15 years of experience, Korea comes 2nd among OECD countries, while salaries at the top of the scale reach 84 263 USD, second only to Luxembourg.
That doesn't include those superstar millionaire teachers---I blogged about them last summer here and here--- who work at cramschools and make a ton of money from subscribers to their video lessons.
Alex of Alex's Adventures in Asia brings up a valid point regarding student-teacher ratio:
[T]hereis only so much a teacher can do in a class with 30+ students other than lecture. Every single child education theory (at least that I've read) stresses that smaller classes and time for one on one attention is the key to superior education. Lecture classes in universities with adults who are capable of sitting still is one thing...have you ever tried to get 8 year old children to sit still for an hour, let alone all day?
The lecture set-up fits in nicely with those Confuciun roots one of Costello's sources mentioned at the beginning of his piece, but are not so useful when it comes to teaching English. Indeed Alex hits on one final point:
Also: if teachers are so selectively chosen than how come most of my fellow native English teachers have co-teachers who can barely speak English?
I've heard about the difficulty of "the test" before, and how teachers take a semester or even a year off to study for it. But you certainly have schools turning out English teachers with limited proficiency in spoken English, and even in other aspects. This is a reflection of what English means in South Korea and why it's taught, and why people who are actually good at English become flight attendants, not English teachers.
7 comments:
Oops, forgot to link to the .pdf file the first time around. It's there now.
I wasn't aware of this English test. I wonder if it's always mandatory. Last year my co-teacher said that her major in college was chemistry and that she was usually a home room teacher, not an English teacher. Do you know where I would find information about that?
Not a test for English, but the test they take before they become teachers. I'm not aware of any specifics, but I've personally known teachers who have taken a year off to study, or who were out of college but working as temp. or substitute teachers before they had taken the test.
I've met some older teachers who spoke pretty decent English, some older teachers who spoke practically none. I've met younger teachers who spoke pretty decent teachers, and some younger teachers who spoke practically none. Outside of these tests there seems to be little real accountability. And like I've written before, they aren't evaluated by their native speaker co-teachers---although we're evaluated by them---so nobody learns that they don't speak English, or don't attend class, or don't come to the weekly workshop, or don't use English in class, or . . . etc.
I'm not sure how it is for elementary school students. When I was teaching in Gangjin county I was told they were phasing out NSETs and just having homeroom teachers teach English. Not a good move for me (I was out of a job), but a money-saving one b/c they just hired a few teachers for the English Village and moved them out of the schools. In rural Korea, things are a little different, and they often don't have actual English teachers. I co-taught with a gym teacher, a music teacher, and a very pregnant woman who spoke no English whatsoever. And, of course the homeroom teachers weren't actually trained to teach English. The elementary school curriculum is designed, though, for anybody to be able to use it, which is why they base it off the CD-Rom, provide a script for classroom English, and do so much with TPR.
Dear god that's terrible. The government always seems to scratch its head and wonder why kids aren't learning English despite all of the money spent. Voila! Here are some more reasons why.
One time my school hired a couple grad students to run some extra after school English classes. They asked me to interview them so that I good judge how well they spoke English.
Of course they sprung this on me on the last minute, and I had about 20 minutes to prepare some questions, which I did. (That is questions that weren't informed at all about the goals, or the point of the class that these guys were supposed to teach)
And they organized the interview so that I had to interview four guys at the same time. Two guys were pretty good, one guy agreed with what the two good guys said, and another guy apologized and sweated a lot. The interview finished and they asked me to go back to my seat. After that, nobody bothered to ask me about what I thought of the potential candidates and they all got the job anyway.
"Why aren’t teachers in the U.S. treated like rock stars? Let’s start paying them more money and attention. It’s the best way to fix our broken education system."
http://makingmindsmatter.com/2010/02/04/rock-star-teacher/
It seems to me you can have the greatest teacher on the planet and pay him $1 million but if parents aren't doing their job at home, it matter zip. The best way to fix a broken education system is to, oh, change a whole generation of parenting.
The current exam (really set of 3 exams) for English teachers is relatively new. These include essay writing, oral interview, and mock teaching performance. For each of these, comprehensive knowledge of teaching and SLA theory are necessary, as well as advance proficiency in English. Most existing English teachers didn't have to take this rigorous exam, thus the observation that many teachers can hardly communicate in English.
Those new teachers who pass these series of exams are highly qualified, at least in terms of English language proficiency and teaching theory. They may be lacking in the skill and art of teaching, but it's arguable whether that can be taught in teacher preparation programs.
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