National Teacher Evaluation Policy Development in South Korea

• In Event: Roundtable Session 124
  In Roundtable Session: Teacher Policies in High-Achieving East-Asian Countries

Abstract

In February 2011, teacher evaluation was added to Korean National Regulations of Teacher Development. The new regulations force local education agencies to administer teacher evaluation based on the guidelines provided by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. In the policy, the teacher evaluation is defined as a diagnosis performed by peer teachers, students and parents. Teachers are evaluated in two capacities: academic instruction and student advice/support. The evaluation results of individual teachers are to be known only to the teacher and the principal to make decisions on professional development needs while aggregated results of each school are to be announced to the public.
The purpose of this study was to understand the meaning of teacher evaluation in South Korean policy. Two questions guided the study: (a) Who are the political actors in the development of teacher evaluation policy? (b) In what ways and to what degree, the multiple voices of the actors are reflected in the policy?
The study employed a hermeneutics perspective that views policy as text to be interpreted (Lejano, 2006). This perspective allows connecting policy to the context through interpretations of text in the larger social context. Policy documents, research reports, and artifacts of public media produced for 10 years prior to the establishment of the regulations were collected for content analyses. Stages of policy process (deLeon, 1999) provided an analytic framework.
The results revealed three competing purposes of teacher evaluation including promotion and compensation, teacher accountability and teacher professional development. Four policy actors played in policy development including government officials, research institutions mostly funded by the government, teacher associations/unions and parent organizations. The degree to which the voices of these actors echoed in the policy was found in the changes of policy discourse. Teacher evaluation entered the political agenda in mid 90s as a way to reform teacher promotion and compensation policy that was largely based on years of experience with nominal assessment of pedagogical ability. With increasing demands on quality education, teacher policy reform agenda shifted its focus to establishing a reward system and highlighting needs for teacher professional development. Parent organizations welcomed the policy based on its emphasis on teacher accountability and possibility to dismiss incapable teachers. Teacher associations/unions challenged the policy on various grounds including that teaching cannot be quantified and ranked. With assistance of educational research institutions and their research findings, a revised teacher evaluation policy was proposed in which promotion was completely separated from teacher evaluation and evaluation was characterized as a way to identify professional development needs for individual teachers. In addition, parent and student feedback was included in the evaluation system.
While the policy was a response to the public demand for quality education it focused on individual teachers whose capacity is ultimately constrained by the community and the system. For effective reform, more global evaluation that encompasses the community and the system should be attended.

Author

• Nam-Hwa Kang, Korea National University of Education