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South Korean tutor Kim Ki-Hoon earns $4 million a year, according to Amanda Ripley, writing in the Wall Street Journal. He earns the near equivalent of an average NBA player’s salary by teaching English – primarily via paid Internet video – in the nation’s omnipresent hagwons, or private, after-school tutoring academies.
This $17 billion after-school learning market has helped turn South Korea — a majority of whose citizens were illiterate sixty years ago — into the second top-performing country in the PISA global test of academic excellence (far outstripping the U.S.). Moreover, notes Ripley, South Korea’s 93% high-school graduation rate dramatically outpaces that of the U.S. (a lowly 77%).
Kim Ki-Hoon is a contributor to, and beneficiary of, South Korea’s high-tech, free-market approach to education. As “Mr. Kim” himself notes, “The harder I work, the more I make.” Indeed, as I noted a year ago in “The Coming Age of the Teaching Megastar,” a popular educator like Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun can earn far more as a private virtual instructor to millions than he ever could as a tenured Stanford professor to dozens.
However, what Kim Ki-Hoon uniquely proves is that the same tech forces — including the disaggregation of content creation from traditional modes of content distribution – that enabled Thrun-like collegiate stardom is now theoretically possible on the secondary level.
However, U.S. secondary education – though a form of content delivery, as my piece onsafe social learning makes clear – has often been an outlier in this broader ed tech revolution. Strict government regulation and omnipresent state involvement in the education marketplace — combined with powerful unions preventing any one teacher from garnering a far bigger slice of the profit pie, let alone profitably branching out on his or her own — has insured that wage increases remain relatively constant and predictable. Moreover, a general lack of transparency on teacher performance ratings and on test results of students under a specific teacher’s care has precluded objective measurements of teaching talent – a kind of Sabermetrics of pedagogy — that could be used by parents and schools in making efficient and empirical teacher evaluations.
But, as Ripley intimates, that could change. The first U.S.-based tutoring rock star wasSalman Khan of the Khan Academy. However, Khan Academy operates as a non-profit. And there is no equivalent American tutoring peer with Khan’s reach and status.
However, what Mr. Kim uniquely provides – and is the key to his 30-person-strong publishing, tutoring, and lecturing empire – is a direct relationship to individual students. Imagine Rafe Esquith, or even Khan himself, grading a student’s physics homework, or personally phoning home to check up on a student’s progress two or three times a month? The combination of mass appeal with individualized feedback is what propels Mr. Kim’s outsized net worth.
All that is needed in the U.S. is a genuine free marketplace where such tutoring superstars can flourish. Mr. Kim, for instance, works for a publicly traded online hagwon called Megastudy . Hagwons, in this sense, are like professional sports teams, constantly on the prowl for top tutoring talent. The more highly-regarded the tutor – whose reputation is linked to how his or her students perform on standardized tests and whether they are accepted into top colleges — the more the hagwon can charge. Moreover, since students sign up for specific tutors, the better a tutor’s reputation, the more money that tutor makes.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that South Korean parents are willing to pay the extra Won to insure that their charges have access to South Korea’s best and brightest tutoring talent. According to Edutech Associates, South Korean “parents with school-age children spend close to 25% of their income on education and all parents spend a large portion of their income on supplementary educational materials.” That means big business for hagwons, South Korea’s primary supplemental education providers.
It is a true meritocracy, where the best and the brightest – or at least the most popular and passionately engaged — end up being paid the most. Moreover, to maintain high standards of accountability and performance, a representative hagwon fires about 10% of its tutors every year. In the U.S., about 2% of public school teachers are fired for poor performance every year.
The downside is that hagwon tutors receive no benefits and no guaranteed salary. The result is that for every Mr. Kim, there is thousands of hagwon tutors who make far less than their traditional brick-and-mortar peers do. It is a zero-sum system that would be written off as patently ruthless if it wasn’t so spectacularly popular.
Notes Ripley, a 2010 survey of 6600 students at 116 South Korean high schools found that South Korean students gave their hagwon tutors far higher marks than their regular schoolteachers, and regularly regarded their hagwon tutors as “better prepared, more devoted to teaching, and more respectful of students’ opinions.” In addition, hagwon tutors are far more likely to experiment with new technology and nontraditional pedagogies, mainly because their pay hinges on the positive reviews that flow from improved student achievement.
Is it all too good to be true? Moreover, is the hagwon model – and corresponding rock-star educator that the best hagwons fight to hire – a uniquely South Korean phenomenon? Or could this healthy level of pedagogical competition happen here in the USA?
Let me know what you think in the Comments area below.
