How Good are Korean Teachers?

Abstract

An analysis performed on three different international survey data such as PISA, PIAAC and TALIS provides critical insights on how good Korean teachers are. Korean teachers are good in the sense that the proportion of top one percentile students who wish to hold a teaching profession in the future is highest in Korea among OECD countries. However, it is strikingly disappointing that the academic excellence that the teachers boasted as a student are lost once they start their career and that the gap between teachers and other professionals remains wide throughout their careers even from the start, while that reported for other countries is much narrow and getting narrower. This also coincides with the regression results that Korean teachers also fail to become prepared to teach through either on-the-job training or effective formal degree programs and professional development programs.