Balancing Excellence and Equity: South Korean Education Issues and Policy

Abstract

South Korea is often renowned in the comparative education field for its students’ high scores on international assessments, regarded as a success story and a role model. Despite this, the Korean education system has multiple issues: high rates of mental health issues among students, differences in educational opportunities determined by socioeconomic disparities, and a large shadow education industry. Since the beginning of the modern Korean education system in the 1950s, policymakers have utilized varying types of reforms in order to mitigate these issues by attempting to find a balance between educational equity and quality. This paper analyzes the patterns of these reforms from multiple perspectives and assesses their success to generate insight about the complexity of the issues as well as possible alternative approaches to policy reform. It details the history of Korean education reform and the responses of scholars to this history to demonstrate that neither the Korean government nor academic experts have been able to reach a consensus about the most effective form of policy for providing quality education for all students. It also explores other countries’ responses to similar problems to provide further insight and explore alternative policy approaches. The findings in this paper suggest that South Korea may be unable to achieve further success in balancing educational equity and quality without making significant changes to the high stakes exam-oriented structure of the education system itself.