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The $4 Million Teacher
I'm currently reading The Smartest Kids in the World: And how they got that way by Amanda Ripley, In this book, the author follows three American teenagers who spend a year in a foreign high school in three countries that have drastically improved their education systems - Finland, Korea, and Poland. In today's excerpt (pp 169-171), she wonders "what would happen in a true free market in which parents had real insight into the rigor of a school and the quality of the teachers....As far as I could tell, there was really only one place in the world with a true free market for education, where supply and demand determined prices, and customers had closer-to-perfect information." That one place, according to Ms Ripley, is the Korean hagwons (private tutoring academies). To illustrate how the hagwons work, she profiles Andrew Kim - a "$4 million teacher".
In Korea, Andrew Kim is a rock-star teacher who earned $4 million in 2010 - because "he was paid according to the demand for his skills, unlike most teachers world-wide. And he was in high demand....Kim explained that he worked about sixty hours per week, although he only taught three in-person lectures. The Internet had turned his classes into commodities. Each lecture he did went online, where kids could purchase his teaching services at the rate of $3.50 per hour. The rest of the time, he responded to students' online requests for help, developed lesson plans, and wrote textbooks and workbooks. He's written about two hundred books. 'The harder I work, the more I make,' he said."
"To call this tutoring was to wildly underestimate its scale and sophistication. Megastudy, the online hagwon that Kim worked for, was listed on the Korean stock exchange. Three of every four Korean kids participated in the private market. In 2011, their parents spent almost $18 billion on cram schools, which was more than the federal government spent fighting the drug war in the United States. The so-called tutoring business was so profitable that it attracted investments from places like Goldman Sachs, the Carlyle Group, and A,I,G."
At hagwons, students are the customers. "To recruit students, hagwons held open houses, sent out mass mailings, and posted their graduates' test scores and university acceptance figures outside their entrances. In the Korean marketplace, results mattered more than anything else. Once students enrolled, the hagwon employees did not wait for parents to get involved, then complain if they didn't; the hagwon embedded itself in their lives. Parents got text messages when their children arrived at the hagwon; then they got another message relaying students' progress. Two to three times a month, the teachers called home with feedback. If parents were not engaged, that was considered a failure of the hagwon, not the family....The most radical difference was that students signed up for specific teachers, not just hagwons, so the most respected teachers got the most students....It was about as close to a pure meritocracy as it could be, and just as ruthless. In hagwons, teachers were free agents. They did not need to be certified. They didn't have benefits or even a guaranteed base salary; their pay was determined by how many students signed up for their classes, by their students' test-score growth, and, in many hagwons, by the results of satisfaction surveys given to students and parents."
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