On: The Hogwon

Most people outside of Korea might guess that the word “Hogwon” is the Korean word for a hog farm or the name of some kind of hog-based commodity. I’ll admit I didn’t have a clue about what a Hogwon was until I started working for one. Even now that I am working for one, I still do not really know how to describe it, because there isn’t really anything like it back home. The closest thing to it is probably a learning center like Sylvan, but even that isn’t really the education model that can describe a Hogwon.

The most basic way to describe it is to say it is an academy designed to augment the education received in public schools. They usually have a specific focus like English (probably the most popular) or Theater, Guitar, Piano, etc., and are private businesses that charge a premium for their services. The school I work for is one of the oldest and largest Hogwons. They serve primarily returnee students, i.e., students who have lived abroad in an English speaking country for a significant period of time, and students possessing a high aptitude in speaking, reading and writing in English. They only hire foreign teachers with English as a native language, or who have developed English skills comparable to a native level. That is to say, none of the teachers at my school passed or even took a Test Of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL).

The key difference between a Hogwon and a place like Sylvan back home is that whereas Sylvan proudly brands itself a center providing a “tutoring service,” Hogwons are proudly branded as schools (or academies). Hogwons are not parochial, they are not non-profit educational institutions; they are businesses, and the parents are customers buying a product called a well-educated student.

As a business they must have consistent, measurable, and demonstrable proof of their product’s quality. Thus, since their product is education, they must have some way of proving that they are better than their competition and that they are in fact improving their students’ abilities to read, write, and speak English. They do this the way that some people believe is the way we ought to be measuring our teachers’ performance back home: through comprehensive and repeated standardized testing, tracking, and leveling. Teachers at Hogwons like the one I work for are evaluated on their students’ performance on monthly tests and regular, standardized, tracking tests. Administrators are concerned primarily with meeting the parent’s expectations, and continually proving that all the students are improving, even if some of them are not.

This attitude puts the teachers in a peculiar quandary, and one that makes me appreciate the work of Education Minnesota and other teacher’s unions back home more than ever. As an Alien Resident teaching for a school that places the parent’s dollar as their top priority, it is often difficult to achieve any kind of vocational or career goal toward being a good teacher, or even hold myself to the standards I would hold myself to if I were a teacher back home.

This week we were asked by our supervisor to review the vocabulary content on one of the tracking testsThese are the regular tests used to determine at what level a student is reading and what class they should be placed in to learn with other students at their level. administered by the school for 40 minutes directly before administering the test, to some of the classes that the administration deemed need to move to a higher track. The motivation for this request came as a result of apparently needing to appease the parents who are skeptical of our school’s abilities. Thus reigning in one of the many criticisms of tracking policy back home: the tracking becomes (or always is) somewhat arbitrary. Tracking students into specific classrooms, particularly when that tracking is guided by income potential and a customer-is-always-right-or-at-the-very-least-should-always-be-pleased philosophy, ignores the students’ innate ability to learn, and the fact that one group of students may start learning at the same rate, but the group’s homogeneity quickly decays as the students begin learning at different rates. That is, students A through G may all be at the same position right now, but students A and E learn quicker than students B-D who also learn at different rates than F-G, and eventually these students are stratified as heterogeneously as a non-tracked classroom.

Many of the critiques of tracking are highlighted at my Hogwon. The upper and lower classes on the tracking strata are stigmatized by, at least, some of the teachers. Once upon a time there was a group of fifth graders reading at a third grade level who were pejoratively nicknamed “The Wizards” by some of the teachers (some of whom were teaching The Wizards) at the school, and assumed to be dumber than the fourth-graders and the rest of the fifth-graders. If these students were interspersed throughout the school’s other classrooms they would not carry the chagrin-laden badge of shame and disdain they carried while students here.

Another critique of tracking systems illuminated in the Hogwon system relates to the effort of students in upper and lower tracks. At my Hogwon the students in the highest levels of their grade’s track are not as apt to put extraordinary effort into their work because they’ve already achieved as much as possible for their grade, and many of the lower level students do not put as much effort into their work because reaching the highest level seems like such a disparate challenge they have not hope of ever achieving.

In addition to being essentially asked to go over the answer key with our students before the test so that they could track up, I also learned this week (and this did not surprise me given the aforementioned business model) that the school is also reluctant to track students down. When the teachers bring forth a criticism of the system, and ask, for example that the school stop pandering to the parents and let the tracking system work so that the teachers can actually teach to the quasi-homogeneous classroom they are supposedly teaching, they are met with a response that essentially says the teachers aren’t important, and what is important is that the school maintain its reputation with the parents, and continue meeting quarterly profit goals. That is, the teachers clock in at second to third on the school’s list of priorities after their ability to take in the requisite cash for the month.
Some people say there is no such thing as non-profit education, just as some people say there is no such thing as a non-profit organization in a market-driven economy. But the difference between non-profit and “business” education is clear after working for the latter, and being educated by the former. The latter is driven by profit first, which often means following the cheaper policy or the one that is better able produce tangible, repeatable results of product reliability. Non-profit education values the contribution teachers make to the organization, and would have the stones to stand up for their teachers in the face of a parent threatening to take their student to another school.

This is not to say that non-profit education is not concerned about enrollment, rather, that enrollment might be among the institutions priorities, and that a non-profit institution’s strategies for improving enrollment might be approached more holistically, rather than focused on consistent and incremental increases on a set of standardized tests. A non-profit version of a Hogwon might brag, for example, about the number of students who go on to study at boarding schools abroad or end up studying at a university in the US or Canada, or the number of students who go on to use their English in some applicable way that really demonstrates the quality of education they are getting. They would have to use the virtues of the system as evidence of its success instead of a steadily increasing trend-line created from data gathered through aggregated test scores.

With all this in mind, it is not surprising that these schools have high faculty turnover rates. Not only are many of the teachers coming from overseas, living thousands of miles from their home and native culture to teach English as Alien residents, those who are looking to make a career out of teaching would probably find their pursuit greatly stifling. A Hogwon like mine dictates a teaching style, a curriculum, and nearly everything short of a daily lesson plan, and performance is measured by the customer’s assessment of whether their child has sufficiently memorized enough vocabulary words. Not necessarily a measure of success in my eyes.