Internship at Canadian Embassy

If any Canadian citizens are interesting in applying for an internship at the Canadian Embassy from March to August 2012 (or know someone who would be), the details can be read here.

Hagwons not following new law allow stoned foreign teachers to wreak havoc in classrooms

On December 17, NoCut News published the following report:

A stoned native speaking instructor and my child...?!
Foreign instructors should be hired after confirming a drug test but this has not been implemented

On December 2 the Eastern Seoul Prosecutor's Office 4th Investigative Division arrested and charged J (23), an Australian native speaking English instructor, with importing a new kind of drug.

On December 8, many members of a group of Korean Americans including Mr. Kim (38) were arrested for forging diplomas in order to work as language hagwon instructors in Korea and for habitually inhaling drugs.

Despite continuous crimes such as taking, distributing or importing drugs by foreign instructors like these, why can they not be prevented in the sphere of education outside of criminal investigations?

Legislation has been made to ban the entry of drugs into hagwons, but in fact it's just empty talk. In addition, it's been pointed out that the educational authorities carrying out enforcement have their hands tied and are passing the buck with their administration.

◇ Hagwons: "A health certificate including a drug test? What's that?"

On December 10th, CBS reporters called a hagwon in Daechi-dong which had posted an job announcement for foreign instructors and made inquiries regarding the documents needed for the application.

The hagwon said, "A passport, degree, and criminal record check are needed." The same was true with a language hagwon in Incheon. Hagwons mostly answered, "Just a resume and diploma is okay" or "they can be hired after submitting a resume and going through an interview."

However, according to the revised law on the Establishment and Operation of Private Teaching Institutes and Extracurricular Lessons which came into effect on October 26, a health certificate including marijuana and drug test results issued within the previous month must be submitted when hiring foreign instructors.

However, CBS has discovered that hagwons are not carrying out the entire foreign instructor hiring process through which a health certificate including drug test results must be submitted.

Even foreign instructor hiring sites openly post that only resumes and application forms are needed and there are many that have no idea about the related regulations nor have any intention of carrying them out.

◇ Educational authorities' hands are tied, "There are no enforcement personnel"

With a situation like this, enforcement by educational authorities is not being accomplished.

An official at an English hagwon in Cheongju, Chungcheongbuk-do, said, "Drug test documents received from foreign instructors are being voluntarily submitted to the relevant education office." "We've never been informed that particular documents should be submitted."

According to the Ministry of Education, Science and Techology (MEST), local education offices which carry out enforcement according to the hagwon law can impose a fine of up to 3 million won for hiring unqualified foreign instructors.

But in reality, local education offices, lacking personnel, cannot enforce this when they don't receive reports from hagwons, and expect that hagwons will voluntarily submit documents when hiring foreign instructors.

A MEST staff member said, "With one or two people, the supervision and enforcement of thousands of hagwons is the difficult part." "The (details of enforcement) are not being regularly reported at present, and if someone feels there's a problem, we can receive requests for action."

An official from a local education office in Seoul complained of the difficulties: "With so many civil complaints over things like the hagwon fee refund issue, we don't have the ability to confirm whether health certificate including drug test results have been submitted when hiring foreign instructors.

According to the "Current status of employed foreigners"report released by the foreign policy division of the immigration service, on September 30, among 600,138 foreigners working in Korea, 22,859 were conversation instructors.

However, with the trend of foreigner-related drug crimes increasing every year, there is a need for thorough measures.

According to the Korean Institute of Criminology, the number of foreigners caught for breaking the drug control law or eradication of drug trafficking law numbered 145 in 2005, 77 in 2006, 227 in 2007, 538 in 2008, 538 in 2009, and 824 in 2010, increasing every year.

Jang Eun-suk, director of the National Association of Parents for True Education said, "After the hagwon law was amended, there was no feeling at all that things have changed." "Parents are very worried about children still being exposed to drug crimes by unqualified foreign instructors who have not been fully verified."

She said, "You can't help but enforce the law by offering rewards for reporting lawbreakers, and we expect that the 'school snitch system' (학파라치 제도) would have an effect, but due to the resistance of hagwons, it won't be implemented."

Stoned teachers? Check. Worries about them being a threat to children? Check. They're made out to be unstoppable due to inability of Korean authorities to enforce the law? Check. It must be a Tuesday.

So, "Legislation has been made to ban the entry of drugs into hagwons." Because apparently the fiends bring their drugs with them to work. (Though, considering positive urine or hair tests count as 'possession,' I suppose those who toke in their spare time do technically carry it with them at all times.)

We're told that "the revised law on the Establishment and Operation of Private Teaching Institutes and Extracurricular Lessons ... came into effect on October 26." From what I could tell looking at the bill, it was promulgated on July 25; whether that means it came into effect that day I'm not sure. This article seems to indicate only one aspect of the bill came into effect on October 26, that being a system rewarding those reporting hagwons which charge too much (just one of four categories of reports which can be rewarded), but fines punishing the hagwons for such behaviour would be suspended, with full punishment starting from March 1 next year. The article says nothing about other portions of the bill being implemented in October.

As for the figures from the Korean Institute of Criminology regarding drug crimes "increasing every year" (145 in 2005, 77 in 2006, 227 in 2007, 538 in 2008, 538 in 2009, and 824 in 2010), these figures are quite different from those in the Supreme Prosecutors Office report on 2010 drug arrests, which are listed below:


No increases "every year" there. Perhaps the moral of the story is that, when looking for statistics to provide a question to the answer you already have, it's best to shop around.

More amusing is the fact that, when presented with Korean citizens deported from the US after serving time for crimes like rape and murder being able to teach children because they faked their backgrounds, NoCut News thought that the real news story was that one or more of them (along with an Aussie teacher in another case) smoked pot while in Korea. I guess there's a question for SMOE's next survey of parents:

Who would you rather have teaching your children?
A) A person from our country convicted of rape or murder
B) A native speaker who habitually inhales drugs

I'd be curious to see if the response would be similar to what NoCut News thinks it should be.

Unfilterable, never-ending defilers

Regarding the former Korean American gangsters deported to Korea who taught English using forged degrees arrested three weeks ago, the Joongang Daily offers this information:

A 38-year-old Korean-American surnamed Kim, one of three arrested for forgery, found employment in a reputable English language academy in Korea as a native foreign language instructor.

According to the police, Kim, who was adopted by a family in America as a child, was a member of an Arizona gang and shot and killed a member of a rival gang in 2000. He was charged with second-degree murder and sentenced to ten years in prison. After receiving parole after eight years, Kim was deported to Korea in October 2007.

Interestingly enough, this man was actually arrested four months before the arrests of the others were announced, as a summary of this article at the Marmot's Hole in August relates:

This guy, identified as Mr. Kim (38), was adopted at 18 months old by an American couple. He left home as a teen, however, and ended up running with a Mexican gang in Arizona. In 2000, he earned himself a 10-year sentence for 2nd degree attempted murder; he was released after seven and deported in Korea in 2007. Prosecutors believe after Kim arrived in Korea, he got a fake degree and taught English at four famous English academies in Gangnam, Goyang and Anyang.

Odd that it took them so long to arrest the others. I imagine that's his diploma in the foreground here.

As for this case, on the day the arrests were announced, the Kookmin Ilbo published this "article":

American native speaking instructors who were gangsters and committed rape and murder... why were they not filtered out?

As the number of native speaking teachers significantly increases, the improper confirmation of such things as their criminal backgrounds is becoming a social problem. The native speaking teacher crime rate increased from 0% in 2008 to 1.6% last year, so there is an urgent need for thorough management and supervision. [...]

[It then retells the story of the Korean Americans who served time in the US for gang related murder, rape and drug crimes before being deported to Korea where they faked their backgrounds to work as instructors in hagwons.]

The government strengthened regulations for native speaking instructors, but they have not been very effective. In July the government amended the "Act related to hagwon establishment and operation and private tutoring" (the hagwon act) making it mandatory to submit a criminal record check, health certificate (including drug screening), and a diploma when hiring native speaking instructors. However the government's measure is only effective for native speaking instructors who are registered with city offices of education. Unregistered instructors, who work for small hagwons which have not registered their instructors with the office of education, are in an enforcement 'blind spot' and can operate freely.

Hagwon owners who do not report to the office of education when hiring a native speaker are fined a mere 500,000 won to 1.5 million won, and in fact hagwons which hire unqualified instructors will bear this fine. [...]

The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education revealed that it has difficulty enforcing laws regarding native speaking instructors. An SMOE official said, "Seoul's 11 educational support offices have only 70 to 80 people in their enforcement squads, but in Gangnam alone there are more than 3000 hagwons. "Due to things like lack of manpower and difficulty working with the Ministry of Justice, it's actually impossible to enforce the laws."

Police notified the relevant office of education regarding hagwon owner Ms. Lee, who hired unqualified English instructors without verification or notification, and seven others, and conducted further investigation into Gangnam and Seoul area hagwons which hire instructors illegally.

To answer the question in title as to why American native speaking instructors were not filtered out, the answer is because the weren't American, they were Korean, and no one asks Korean teachers for overseas criminal record checks. Also, the lack of due diligence on the part of the hagwon owners played a part in their diplomas not being found out.

As for this - "As the number of native speaking teachers significantly increases..." - I fail to see a significant increase occurring (presently) in the number of E-2 visa holders (stats can be found here):

2000 - 6,414
2002 - 10,864
2004 - 11,344
2005 - 12,439
2006 - 15,001
2007 - 17,721
2008 - 19,771
2009 - 22,642
2010 - 23,314
2011.11 - 22,895

The cuts to the GEPIK program (and future cuts to SMOE) will see these numbers fall even further (they've been fluctuating over the last year already), as the massive expansion (of around 2000 per year) since 2005 was due mostly to public school hiring.

As for this - "the native speaking teacher crime rate increased from 0% in 2008 to 1.6% last year" - I will go out on a limb and guess that these figures were pulled from some remote recess of the reporter's rectum. Either that or the reporter managed to track down statistics not yet published in the media or by Anti English Spectrum.

We're also told that there is an "urgent need for thorough management and supervision" of native speaking teachers, something that appears to be a required phrase for such articles. They are, however correct that better management is needed, but not of E-2s. All of the wanted murderers (or attempted murderers) and former gangsters/criminals caught teaching English here since 2006 (various Korean American former gangsters deported from the US caught teaching illegally in 2006, wanted murderers David Nam (caught in 2008) and Ronald Rhee (caught in 2010), another gangster deported for attempted murder arrested with Rhee, and the former gangsters arrested this month) have been Korean citizens, while wanted murderer Sang-woo Ye (caught in 2010) was presumably on an F-4 and the Korean American gangster turned hagwon owner wanted for attempted murder caught this summer used identity theft to pose as a Korean citizen. (There may even be one more wanted murderer hiding out here.)

The article then brings up the revisions to the hagwon law passed in the summer and asserts that the law won't have any effect on those teachers not registered with city offices of education. Such "unregistered instructors, [who] are in an enforcement 'blind spot' and can operate freely," seem to exist only in the columns of the Kookmin Ilbo, as we saw here (the only other article that describes the threat of "unregistered native speaking instructors" (who, by the way, commit "never ending" "drugs and molestation... in hagwons")).

And, of course, the article mentions the other never-ending problem with USFK members foreign teachers, that due to SOFA institutional hurdles, "it's actually impossible to enforce the laws." This, of course, is a great problem, one which was, in fact, predicted by Choe Ik-hyeon when he opposed King Gojong's plans to negotiate what would be known as the Ganghwa Treaty with the Japanese in early 1876 (as translated in this book). Choe wrote that "Although they call themselves Japanese, they are really Western bandits," and he feared that Korea would be "defiled" and "reduced to the level of wild animals" by their presence, which would be allowed by the treaty and would permit them to "build dwellings and reside within our borders." Due to the agreement, he said, the Korean government would have "no grounds to stop them," and so they would be able to "plunder our property and violate women at will, and no one will be able to restrain them.[...] There will be countless cases of this nature."

"Countless." "Endless." "Never-ending." As we can see, Choe's Confucian-inspired feeling of moral supremacy over the barbarians tinged with fears of Korea being defenseless before them as they committed never-ending outrages against women and property (was there really a distinction then?) still holds sway over some people (especially in the news media) 135 years later.

Clearly, this xenophobia coloured by moral superiority felt by the upper/educated class predates modern nationalism, but the degree to which the the former influences the latter (or how they inform each other) is not something that has been much explored, as far as I know.

I couldn't help but think about this when I read this Donga Ilbo editorial (as translated by the Korea Herald on September 24, 1988) published during the 88 Olympics:

One of the reasons we decided to host the event despite its staggering burden was to show the world the true picture of Korea. We wanted to show our friends from abroad our moral and ethical supremacy that far transcends our political and economic potentials.

Articles from the Korea Times and the Korea Herald (which were aimed at foreign tourists!) during the Olympics make quite clear this feeling of 'ethical supremacy.' This is revealed by even a quick glance at the titles of articles about, for example, foreign athletes' 'drug use' (steroids) detected by superior Korean technology, or those that highlighted every after-hours mishap involving American athletes or complained about 'biased' coverage by NBC. This page of photos of foreign spectators in the Donga Ilbo certainly doesn't put them in a very good light either (girl in hot pants with legs spread, foreign men with their shirts off). Taking that into consideration with the fact that the government (and later civil society groups) wanted to test all foreign visitors to Korea for AIDS, and, well, you start to see patterns. Not for nothing did the Joongang Ilbo editorialize thusly in 1984:

The true educational effect of foreign language learning is that when learning to speak and write a foreign country’s language, to some degree one learns its culture and ‘spirit’ as well. Attaching importance to conversation, [learners] can’t distinguish a teacher’s or instructor’s standard of refinement and mistake them for nothing but a 'tape recorder.' Ultimately there’s a worry that when learning conversation students will imitate that country’s vulgar culture, vulgar living language, and vulgar values. [...] Also, for this reason it could come to pass that our citizens' image of their level of culture will fall and will offset the effectiveness of gaining foreign language learning.[Emphasis added]

Interestingly enough, in describing how learning a "foreign country’s language" causes one to learn "its culture and ‘spirit’ as well," this also echoes Choe Ik-hyeon's 1876 memorial, in which he also warned that "books of their wicked religion...will be mixed in with other trading goods and...will be all over the country before long." Some, including King Gojong, thought "Eastern ways/ethics" could be used together with (and temper) "Western learning" (dongdo seogi), but fears of unwanted, decadent western "culture and 'spirit'" piggybacking on western technology have been a perennial worry, and was explicitly referred to by Park Chung-hee when he cracked down on marijuana and rock and folk music (and youth culture in general) in 1975-76 and called for "selective adoption" of foreign culture. Needless to say, such fears of foreigners bringing unwanted culture with them are alive and well today, (with even one reporter (out to "correct biased views on Korea") writing an article for ABC news titled "Drug Toting Teachers Defiling South Korea"), as are assertions that westerners in Korea can't be controlled and commit endless crimes (the former turning up today in the first article described here).

Choe, it should be mentioned, died of self-imposed hunger in a Japanese prison after leading an uprising against the Japanese in 1906 at the age of 76, so you certainly can't say he didn't follow through on his beliefs. One wonders if there is a statue of him somewhere.

Christmas

Strange that Seoul will have more snow for Christmas than my hometown in Ontario. On a related note, "I still believe in Christmas trees" by the Telstar Ponies just popped into my head, and here it is on youtube.



Something else I just remembered is Takako Minekawa's cover of NRBQ's 'Christmas Wish.'



I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas.

Spot the difference

Pyongyang, 2011:


Pyeongchang, 2007:


I can't help seeing the kids in the top photo and wondering if they were simply tired of standing in the cold (it's five degrees colder there than Seoul today). I'm also reminded of this story:

'Well, some years ago we were told that he was coming down to our town and that he would visit a local school. There was great excitement. The security people wouldn't exactly say when he was coming, but they told the school to go ahead and make all the preparations to greet him properly. So they did just that: they arranged a ceremony, and as one of the ways of welcoming him, they made a huge portrait of him, broken up into hundreds of pieces on the back of coloured cards. When the children held the cards up one way, they made a pretty pattern. When they turned the cards over, there was the president's face.

'The day arrived, and we were told when he would be arriving. The children were ready, everyone very nervous. Then one of the children asked permission to go to the bathroom. His teacher said that would be fine, but hurry. Well, you can guess what happened; while the boy was in the bathroom, the president arrived, and the security people wouldn't let the boy back onto the field. So the celebration went on, the children did their dances with the cards and turned this way and that, and then all together, turned them over.

'The president's face was there all right - except that it was missing a left eyebrow. The official people went crazy! The president himself didn't say anything, of course, but after the party was gone, the education department had the master in and fired him on the spot. The headmaster was in trouble. I even heard they visited the parents of the child and warned them of the consequences. And then an instruction went out. If ever there was a demonstration of loyalty like that again, the children had to be told that if they wanted to pee, they peed where they stood.

This story (reminiscent of this ad) does not take place in North Korea. It's told by a former teacher in Simon Winchester's Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles, and takes place in the early 1980s in Jeolla-do; the president in question is Chun Doo-hwan. Winchester himself admits it may not be true, though other Koreans he meets elsewhere in Korea admit they've heard it.

Of course, Chun wasn't the only president who was pixelized on cards:

(Busan, 1976; from Through our eyes: Peace Corps in Korea 1966-1981)

I wonder when card displays of this sort began in Korea.

Floors 4 and 14

[Update: Another student at the same school committed suicide just as this case was being investigated.]

One of last night and today's news topics has gained a great deal of attention in part, I imagine, to the photos below (taken from a cctv camera video which can be seen here).


Apparently she hit the buttons for floor 4 and floor 14, staying in the elevator at the fourth floor and proceeding to the fourteenth. As you might guess, she didn't use the elevator to get down. This story came to light because someone posted a few days ago on a bulletin board about his younger cousin, a 17 year old high school student in Daejeon, who was found dead on December 3 on the roof of the apartment entrance, her shoes and bag left on the 14th floor. The cousin wrote that she couldn't bear being ostracized by her peers, and charges that her teacher who showed no interest in her plight is responsible, something that the school has denied to inquiring newspapers, and will likely do so as police investigate (as described here and here).

Teachers in Korea - homeroom teachers especially - are expected in their own way to be counselors as well, and the attention, or lack thereof, given by teachers to students like the girl in this case would likely have more impact here than in Canada.

I got to watch one of my students go through becoming a 'wangtta' earlier this year. I knew her homeroom teachers from this year and last year, and while they could point to the problem - a classmate of hers who was directing the rest of the class to ignore her - there wasn't much they could do other than talk with her (a lot). While things eventually improved, the experience changed her a great deal from the way she was a year earlier (though I imagine puberty contributed to that).

The same things happen back home - the day the girl in Daejeon died, an anti-bullying rally was held in Montreal after the suicide of a 15 year old girl due to bullying, and the recent suicide of a boy who was targeted as an openly gay student in Ottawa led the Ontario government to introduce new anti-bullying legislation. Though solutions have been offered, it's one thing to try to stop physical bullying, but how does one stop ostracism? It's not like you can force people to associate with someone, which makes the Korean brand of this particularly difficult to deal with.

The 2011 Amendments to the Hagwon Law

I've probably mentioned this several times, but I've never gotten around to posting about it specifically. On June 29, the National Assembly passed a bill amending the hagwon act which applies to foreign English teachers. The bill itself can be found here (in Korean). It was promulgated on July 25, 2011.

Act on the Establishment and Operation of Private Teaching Institutes and Extracurricular Lessons (in Korean here)
Some revised bills (alternative)
Bill # 12398
Date proposed: 2011.6.28
Submitted by: Chairperson of the Education, Science and Technology Committee

In the introduction we are told that the bill is essentially a compilation of various bills submitted over the past three years (Rep. Choi Young-hee, 2009.06.09; Rep. Kim Bu-gyeom, 2008.12.01; Rep. Gwon Yeong-gil, 2008.12.03; Rep. Lee Sang-min, 2008.12.24; Rep. Park Jong-hui, 2009.03.24; Rep. Lee Gun-hyeon, 2009.06.10; Rep. An Sang-su, 2009.09.02; Rep. Jeong Du-eon, 2009.11.10; Rep. Jo Jeon-hyeok, 2009.11.25; Rep. Kim Chun-jin, 2010.04.10).

Some of these names are familiar. Choi Young-hee proposed revisions to the school and kindergarten laws as well, but has finally found success with her planned revision to the hagwon law. Lee Gun-hyeon was responsible for releasing 'serious' foreign instructor crime stats (which showed their crime rate to be one fifth of the Korean crime rate) and Jo Jeon-hyeok was responsible for "forcing" foreign instructors to learn about Korea (as per KBS, via Brian). Choi Young-hee and Jo Jeon-hyeok's marks on this bill can be seen in the provisions regarding foreign instructors, which are just one focus out of several in this collection of bills. Here are the parts of the revised bill referring to foreign instructors:

The following will be established for Article 13 paragraph 3

In the case of foreign instructors (non-citizens of the Republic of Korea who, in accordance with paragraph 1, are responsible for instruction in a hagwon. Hereafter the same), training will be conducted more than once after entering the country to improve their skills as those responsible for social education and aid them in adapting to Korean culture.

The following will be established for Article 13-2
Article 13-2 (the hiring of foreign instructors) The person who established or manages the hagwon must, when hiring a foreign instructor to be responsible for foreign language instruction, submit the each of the following documents and have them confirmed before hiring the instructor:

1. A criminal background check
2. A health certificate (issued within the previous month and including the results of a drug and marijuana test)
3. An educational background certificate
4. Anything else prescribed by presidential decree

[As well, Article 23, which deals with penalties, will have paragraph 3-1 added to it, which stipulates that 3 million won will be the penalty if Article 13-2 is not followed.]

Supplementary Provisions

Article 5 (Interim Measures for foreign instructors carrying out foreign language instruction) According to the revised regulations in article 13-2, those currently working as foreign instructors must submit the documents listed in article 13-2 within one month of this law coming into effect.

Article 6 (Application of training for foreign instructors) After article 13(3)'s revised regulations within this law come into effect, they will apply to those foreign instructors who enter the country for the first time.

While it's good that this ostensibly closes the F-visa loophole, it doesn't solve the problem of Korean citizens who have lived abroad who have committed crimes there (and have either been deported to Korea or have fled to Korea to escape justice).

Detecting native speaking instructors with forged diplomas

The Chosun Ilbo published this 'article' on December 18, which is rather similar to these 'foreign teachers, being non-Korean, could commit crimes at any time' ads passing as articles from this summer:

[Why] "Detecting native speaking instructors with forged diplomas" a boom for inquiry service providers

Significant increase after Shin Jeong-a incident
On the 8th police caught Korean Americans who had been imprisoned for violent crimes like murder and rape in, and deported from, the United States, and who had forged degrees from well known universities to work as English instructors in Korea. As there is a continuous inflow of foreign workers into Korea, cases of forged degrees are also occurring again and again. Because of this, requests to educational inquiry service providers to confirm the authenticity of degrees are increasing.

The article then rehashes the story of Shin Jeong-a and says these businesses have seen increases in business by 20% each year since her story came to light (suggesting this growth has little to do with the "continuous inflow of foreign workers into Korea"), but fails to make any other specific mentions of foreign teachers or of foreigners. Unsurprisingly, the article is an advertisement for this company, and though it reports on the arrest of the Korean Americans (who one assumes are Korean citizens, having been deported here), we're presented with this photo:

"Native speaking teacher file photo. The photo above is not related to this article."

Nice ass-covering caption.

It's interesting how looking up "원어민 위조" rather than "원어민" turned up a lot more news stories about the recent arrests (as in, 20 more), with Yonhap publishing several photos of the police displaying the former gangsters' forged diplomas:



The Chosun Ilbo article begs the question, however: Are forged degrees still really a problem with foreign teachers (as in non-Korean citizens) like they were with numerous high profile arrests a few years ago (when KBS claimed that 20% of native speaking teachers had forged diplomas)?

In a September 19, 2011 Hankook Ilbo article (which crashed Firefox for me), it was reported that National Assembly Education, Science and Technology Committee member Kim Se-yeon (GNP) reported that 146 people had been arrested for faking their academic backgrounds between 2008 and 2010, with 76 caught in 2008, 32 in 2009, and 38 in 2010. Of those, 40 worked for hagwons, but while the use of faked diplomas from US universities is mentioned, there's no mention of foreign teachers, except at the end, where Kim is quoted as saying,

Because of the social controversy over the problem of foreign instructors lacking qualifications, a similar verification procedure for faked diplomas should be regularly and systematically carried out.

We might remember Rep. Kim Se-yeon as one of those who mistakenly declared that over half of NSETs break their contracts. One imagines that, especially with her invocation of foreign teachers, that if there were a sizable number of foreign teachers involved, they would have been mentioned. So I decided to take a look.

In 2008 I was able to find three cases connecting native speaking teachers and forgery. In the first, in May 2008, three people from Ghana and a Korean-Australian (the latter's role isn't explained) were arrested for faking documents (including alien registration cards), and a hagwon owner who hired them was also booked.

In another case in November 2008, an American 'delivery boy' who worked in Korea for 12 years with a forged diploma was arrested, but though NoCut News reported (via its headline) that "a bunch of native speaking instructors had been caught for faked backgrounds," 5 other teachers were actually busted for teaching privates (made clearer in this article).

Another case from December was reported by SBS, who opened their report by saying, "These days, if one establishes an English hagwon, what’s crucial is securing a native speaking instructor. In particular, finding a native speaking teacher with a proper teaching qualifications is almost impossible." [It leaves out the part about this being impossible because hagwons generally don't look for them.] The case is better explained here, where we're told that a Nigerian who worked in a hagwon as a native speaking instructor was arrested as part of a group that used a computer program to copy credit cards and made 28 fake cards, stealing 138 million won. (It doesn't mention forged diplomas, though).

So for 2008, that makes 4-5 foreign teachers (or one or two people from one of the 7 English speaking countries allowed to teach English) with fake diplomas. There were none reported in 2009, and the Ronald Rhee case was the only one in 2010 (he was a dual citizen, and the other person arrested who used a fake degree was a Korean citizen) and the only case of a 'native speaking teacher' being busted for a forged degree that I could find this year was a Chinese woman working in an elementary school.

While the association of 'native speaking teacher' with 'forged degree' may have had some substance five or six years ago, it doesn't seem to be the case now, though that doesn't stop it from being brought up in advertisements passing as news articles as one of the 'social problems' caused by foreign teachers.

Foreigners make up 3% of Korea's population

The Joongang Daily reported on the weekend that foreigners now make up 3% of Korea's population, and with over 1.4 million foreigners as of October, the foreign population has increased 13% since the end of last year. The last big news of this sort was when the number of foreigners surpassed 1 million (or 2%) in 2007.

Although international migrations to Korea decreased in 2009 for the first time since Seoul began monitoring them in 2000 mainly because of the worldwide economic slump, the trend reversed last year in line with the country’s economic recovery, the ministry said.

Migrant workers comprised the largest group of all foreign nationals, accounting for 42.5 percent, the data showed. Around 9 percent of them were illegal workers, the ministry found. By nationality, Chinese ranked first with 53.1 percent, followed by Vietnamese with 11 percent, Filipinos with 5 percent and Indonesians with 4.77 percent, according to the data.

Immigrants married to Koreans formed the second-largest group of foreign residents here, taking up 10.1 percent of the total international population in the country. Chinese ranked first, totaling 45.4 percent of all spouses, followed by Vietnamese with 25.35 percent and Japanese with 7.64 percent, according to the data. Foreign wives accounted for nearly 90 percent of the total marriage immigrants, it showed.

The third-largest group of foreign nationals here were students who came to Korea to study. Among the total 93,232 international students, 20 percent were studying the Korean language, according to the statistics. Chinese, again, turned out to be the largest group among international students here with 72.9 percent, followed by Mongolians with 5.25 percent, Vietnamese with 3.47 percent, Japanese with 2.61 percent and Americans with 1.32 percent, the data showed.

Detailed immigration statistics can be found here, (on each page, click the zip file to get excel files). There has been a large increase in the number of foreigners this year; here are the year-end stats since 2000, which I posted here last year:

2000 - 491,324
2001 - 566,835
2002 - 629,006
2003 - 678,687
2004 - 750,873
2005 - 747,476
2006 - 910,149
2007 - 1,066,273
2008 - 1,158,866
2009 - 1,168,477
2010 - 1,261,415

Here are the statistics by month this year:

1,236,385 January
1,260,841 February
1,308,743 March
1,354,414 April
1,353,967 May
1,392,167 June
1,411,013 July
1,410,259 August
1,418,149 September
1,403,355 October

Between February and July, the population increased by 150,000, which is a pretty large increase. Here's a breakdown by nation (including totals, and broken down by gender) for some countries from October of this year:




Here are the top 15 countries (or groups) by population:

Korean Chinese
Chinese
USA
Vietnam
Philippines
Japan
Thailand
Indonesia
Uzbekistan
Mongolia
Taiwan
Canada
Sri Lanka
Cambodia
Bangladesh

Unsurprisingly, they're mostly Asian countries, with the US and Canada added in (with the US in third place).

Kim Jong-il dead

[Update: Some interesting photos and videos from Pyongyang]

I was just told by my co-workers that Kim Jong-il is dead.

The BBC is reporting that North Korean state-run television "said he had died on Saturday of physical and mental over-work."

I imagine the next few months should be interesting...

[Update: Using a proxy to try to get through to KCNA isn't working - not surprising that it would be down. And I would imagine AP had this lengthy article prepared beforehand...]

SMOE budget passed

[Update - paragraph added at bottom]

Yonhap reported yesterday that on the 17th, the Seoul city council's special budget committee passed SMOE's budget of 7,094,953,700,000 won (32.9 billion won more than SMOE asked for).

According to SMOE a good deal of the debate over the budget was in regard to senior teachers and the budget for placement of native speaking teachers, which saw cuts by the education committee and was then partly restored by the special budget committee.

The education committee of the city council also cut 4.9 billion won from the budget for placement of native speaking teachers in elementary and middle schools, though [in the end] in the budget committee, the office of education's submitted budget of 31.4 billion won was cut only by 2.2 billion won down to 29.1 billion won.

According to this, next year native speaking teachers will disappear from high schools, as per SMOE's original plan, but are expected to remain at current levels in elementary and middle schools.

[A revised version of this article instead says "but are expected to remain at current levels in elementary and middle schools until at least the first half of next year," and deletes the following paragraph:]

An SMOE official said, "Allowances were made for middle school native speaking teachers whose contract periods end next August and the budget was expanded again." "During the second half of the year a supplementary budget for placing native speaking teachers in middle schools should be further reviewed."

Interesting that the above paragraph was cut. Perhaps that means there will be no supplementary budget for NSETs next summer.

As well, next year the free lunch program will be expanded to students in the first year of middle school and the Seoul City Council education committee decided SMOE would shoulder 50% of the total cost of 55.3 billion won (27.65 billion won), with the remaining 50% to be covered by Seoul City Government (30%) and each gu (city district).

The budget should be completely settled today.

Some of the figures there are interesting. It says SMOE's planned budget of 31.4 billion won was cut only by 2.2 billion won down to 29.1 billion won. However, the original SBS report said that the budget was set to be 30.2 million won - a 1.2 billion won discrepancy. As well, SBS reported that last year's budget of 34.6 million won for NSETs was to be cut by 9.3 billion won (4.4 SMOE planned to cut + 4.9 wanted by the council), or by 27% - and yet it reported that 57% of NSETs would be cut.


Someone needs to brush up on their math. What makes the 57% figure even more ridiculous is the fact that SMOE does not fund all of the foreign teachers. I recently saw a list of the teachers in my district whose contracts were being renewed, and out of twenty, 12 were funded by SMOE, 4 by Seoul city government, and 4 by the local district office. While that's a small sample, it does at least make clear that SMOE doesn't fund all of the teachers. As for current NSET numbers, I've been told that there are currently 579 elementary school teachers, 372 middle school teachers, and 291 high school teachers, or 1242 teachers all together.

Something else I haven't seen mentioned is that last week there was a panel on English education in the Seoul school system, which is described here.


The writer of that blog, a Korean elementary school English teacher who has worked with native speaking teachers, also wrote a long opinion piece for Ohmynews (called "It's easy to be a native speaking teacher!) which calls the cuts 'welcome' and, while saying that some teachers were okay and some just came for the money (and the best only stayed for a year), concludes by asking which is more important for 'our future' - giving money to native speakers or food to children?

The SMOE English education survey

I just came across the survey about English education commissioned by SMOE that was looked at here a few weeks ago and is being used to justify NSET cuts. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but at 13 pages, there's certainly going to be more to consider than the initial reports on it, or SMOE's one sentence summary of it ("parents prefer Korean teachers with good English skills").

It can be found (in Korean) here (or downloaded directly (pdf) here) I should note that it downloaded for me as a 'file' and prompted me to choose a program to open it with, which may just be a result of running the buggy newer firefox).