South Korean alternative schools for North Korean defectors

• In Event: Poster session I

Group Submission Type: Poster Session

Proposal

Overview

South Korea has received around 3,000 North Korean defectors each year for the past two decades. During the journey of escaping North Korea and entering China, which does not give defectors refugee status and will immediately send them back to North Korea when they are caught to be interrogated, tortured, sent to prison camps, or killed by the North Korean government. As North Korean defectors struggle to reach a country that grants them asylum, they must travel across China, travel through Laos, Myanmar, or Thailand to receive assistance from the South Korean government. During this journey, they are constantly living in paranoia, fear, and abuse from those who choose to take advantage of them. 90% of the defectors are often women in the past decade and become victims of sex trafficking. The traumatic events and the years of discontinued education during the journey to South Korea where they can receive asylum, citizenship, and stipends to help assimilation and resettlement plays a major role in the education of these defectors. According to the Ministry of Unification, around 40% of the defectors are children and young adults. When these children enter the educational system, they face a difficult time adjusting to the public education system because of their emotional difficulties that impede their learning, the wide academic achievement gap, and the discrimination they face from the various actors in their school.
South Korean policymakers became aware of the difficulties North Korean defector students faced once they entered South Korean public school system, especially for those who were in the upper elementary grades and up. The inability to accommodate for their differences in academics, social and emotional abilities, societal and cultural expectations, language, political and personal identities, and familial relationships affected students’ motivation and learning outcomes at school. Several defectors report to feeling estranged from their peers because of the little they have in common and often felt like they had to hide their identities whenever possible. Many of them are also placed in lower grades with much younger peers. In order to accommodate for these needs that were brought into light, the Ministry of Education piloted an alternative school for middle and high school students from the age of 14 to 25 in 2005.
The government piloted school, Hangyeorae School, was implemented as an initiative to reduce the high dropout rates among defector students and to create an environment that met their unique needs while supporting them to assimilate to society with various curriculum that included life skills, social emotional learning, technical and vocational skills, and debate classes. A year later, Hangyeorae High School began with 22 students; the school was funded half by the Ministry of Education, the other half by the Ministry of Unification. Although the core problem of the school was its distant location from the city due to opposition from the local communities, Hangyeorae High School successfully increased the transfer enrollment rate for students from middle to high school.
To date, the school’s efforts have exceeded expectations—it not only has increased the defector students’ retention rates, it also has provided a learning environment specifically to address their academic and emotional needs. In the past seven years three other schools followed suit to become accredited, supervised and funded by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Unification. These schools’ curriculum is aligned with approximately 50% of the national curriculum, with additional flexibility in adding courses that are deemed necessary by the principals to assist students with navigating in the modernized and globalized society. In addition to the four accredited schools, there are also approximately 15 unaccredited alternative schools. These unaccredited schools are not regulated and sponsored by the government and are funded by various sources: private organizations, religious institutions, non-profit organizations, or a combination of these sources. Unlike the accredited schools, which have 75 to 150 students per school, the unaccredited schools have no more than 30 students (Ministry of Unification, 2018). Meanwhile, their student body consists of not only North Korean defector students, but also include students who are born from North Korean mothers and fathers of a different nationality where Korean is not their mother tongue. Those who attend the unaccredited schools, however, do not receive high school diplomas and must take the performance test that is the equivalence to a high school diploma instead.


1. Contextual Background

In the mid 1990s when North Korea faced the Great Famine, more than 25 million people died from starvation. During this period, schools suffered from high absence rates of teachers and student absenteeism because they were too hungry to attend school and focus on academics (Blakemore, 2017). While the general population in North Korea during this time lacked basic education due to famine, the majority of North Koreans defectors faced arduous and traumatizing situations on their journey to South Korea. The only non-hostile neighboring country to North Korea, China considers fleeing North Korean defectors as economic migrants—persons who have no legal status and, as a result, have to constantly move from one place to another while facing sexual and physical abuse, paranoia, and fear from being captured and deported by Chinese immigration officers. In order to achieve refugee status, they have to travel from China to Thailand by hiking mountains in Laos or Myanmar to safely reach the Korean Embassy where they can be then transported to South Korea. This tremendously difficult journey with a slim success rate takes an average of three years, according to the Ministry of Unification, often adding onto the time period of discontinued education.
According to USA today, in the year 2017, 85% of the North Korean defectors resettled to South Korea are females who fled along with their kids. Due to the discontinued education along the journey, upon their resettlement, they face a myriad of difficulties when introduced to the high stakes standardized testing environment in South Korea where graduating from college is an essential step in social mobility. The South Korean government built Hanawon centers in 1999, a governmental training facility where you must complete as North Korean defector, to facilitate the initial assimilation process by providing healthcare, counseling services, and an education program for the first three months. However, the three months of training is significantly insufficient to narrow the gap between North Korean defectors compared to beneficiary of public school system in South Korea. Therefore, South Korean officials decided to implement the alternative school system that could accommodate these defector students in need of additional care.

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2. Lack of Professional Development for Teachers and Principals

The curriculum created for these North Korean defector students are very unique. They follow 50% of the national curriculum in subjects like math, Korean, English, social studies, science, and art, but they also have classes that have the goals of preparing students to assimilate to society. Some of these courses include learning how to be a democratic citizen, computer classes, technical and vocational courses, a strong emphasis on history, moral and ethics, debate class, and volunteer programs for students to be empathetic towards those who are also facing hardship. The demands of this curriculum require the training of both principals and teachers to be able to meet the needs of their students outside of the preparation they receive from their studies and their experience.
Almost all of the teachers who work in the alternative schools are licensed teachers, but lack continuous support during their career, The professional development for teachers are often limited to individual group models and weekly meetings led by the principals at their individual schools. During this meeting, the teachers discuss teaching practices and continually work on developing curriculum and teaching skills. Despite the recent increase in the number of defector students, most of the teachers have no prior experience in teaching them or other students with mental and emotional needs. Although accredited schools have defined procedures and trainings that are regulated by the Ministry of Education and required for all professionals in the system, unaccredited schools are in need of such educational infrastructure and thus face the task of creating their own programs and planning their meetings. The meetings are held on the school level and lack communication with other accredited and unaccredited schools about the curriculum and their instructional strategies. Currently, there is no standardization of students’ expected learning outcomes and a uniform platform for the schools to share teaching practices.
Principals, according to the regulations in founding an alternative school, do not need licensure or previous teaching experience. Although all of the principals have extensive experience in working with North Korean defectors in China or with refugees in Sub Saharan Africa, many of them do not have the resources of professional development that is also continuous and relevant to their needs. The few that are offered only occur once a year and the absenteeism that occurs in these professional development opportunities decreases the impact it can have.

Word Count: 393

3. Limitations

The lack of funding prevents principals from hiring more full time, national certified teachers for their students. While the benefit of the use of certified teachers in alternative schools is well recognized, the lack of funding forces unaccredited schools to resort to external sources. Moreover, unaccredited schools suffer from higher costs associated with school maintenance—the provision of school supplies, meals, housing, and extracurricular activities—than those of public schools in general. Due to restrictions in being able to hire full-time teachers due to costly school budgets, unaccredited schools turn to volunteers to supplement their teaching staff. Some alternative schools have hiring criteria for volunteer teachers. For example, the Great Vision School requires a minimum of a six-month commitment for their volunteer teachers. More often than not, however, unaccredited schools recruit volunteers with no certification background in teaching but are often chosen by their desire and interest to teach defector students or students of North Korean descent. No unaccredited schools have official training programs for volunteers and, as a result, their volunteers are only asked to sign a confidentiality agreement for their service. Also, the high turnover rate of volunteers who serve for approximately six months creates an environment of inconsistency in a situation where students benefit the most when there are stable relationships. It also creates a gap in the contents being taught by the next group of replacements.
The lack of funding also limits schools from hiring full time counselors to match the demands of their students. Most schools will only have one counselor per school when many of the students suffer from traumatic experiences and PTSD. Trust is an important and necessary means for students to open up, but the lack of relatable counselors and the hesitancy of the students to share about their experiences make it difficult for the students to receive the mental care that they need. The lack of funding for these alternative schools also makes it difficult for principals to allocate all of their time towards the management and leadership responsibilities for their school. They often need to allocate their time towards fundraising and organizing fundraising events to meet the demands of the school.

Word Count: 361

Sub Unit

• SIG: East Asia

Chairs

• Clara Sangyeon Do, Harvard Graduate School of Education

• Eunbi Lee, Harvard Graduate School of Education