Explaining academic achievement gaps in South Korea with multicultural education paradigms

ABSTRACT

The academic achievement gap between racial and ethnic majority and minority students in South Korea has received attention over the past decade, with one government-funded report and 10 peer-reviewed articles examining the performance of diverse student groups in the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Achievement. We conducted a qualitative content analysis of these 11 studies to understand how the evident achievement gap is explained by researchers and what assumptions are embedded in these explanations. Using multicultural education paradigms as theoretical lenses, we classified the explanations and advanced understanding; findings indicated that the cultural deprivation paradigm dominated the discussion of the academic performance of ethnic minority students. While other explanations were also found, some of these reinforced stereotypes about ethnic minority groups without corroborating evidence. Emergent efforts to address the strengths of ethnic minority students were insufficient to reflect the authentic view of the cultural difference paradigm. Implications were drawn for researchers and educators who study academic achievement gaps between ethnic minority and majority students in multicultural societies.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic achievement gap
• ethnic minority students
• national assessment
• multicultural education paradigms
• South Korea

Acknowledgement

The first version of this article was presented to the 2015 Korean Association for Multicultural Education Conference, Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea. We appreciate valuable comments from conference attendees. We also wish to thank the scholars who read various drafts of this article and provided insightful comments that enabled us to strengthen it: Dr. Geneva Gay and Dr. James A. Banks.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Each act requires the respective governmental agencies to develop and implement government policies for North Korean defectors and multicultural families. The Multicultural Families Support Act states, “The State and local governments shall develop systems and conditions necessary to help multicultural family members enjoy stable family life, and shall establish and implement policies therefore” (Article 3: Responsibilities of State and Local Governments). Similarly, the North Korean Refugees Protection and Settlement Support Act demands that the government “provide support to persons eligible for protection, including protection, education, employment, accommodation, medical care, and support for minimum living standards, and endeavour to secure financial resources therefor in a stable way” (Article 4–2: Obligations of the State).

2. KICE has been one of the central governmental education authorities in South Korea in the decision-making process of educational policies and implementation especially in the areas of curriculum, national assessment, and textbook policies and authorization with the commission from the Korean Ministry of Education. It was established in 1998 based on the law of a national act (No. 5344) promulgated in August 1997. It is supervised by the National Research Council for Economics, Humanities, and Social Science under the Korean Prime Mister’s Office, and the government contributes to over 85 percent of the costs of the institute.

3. Meanwhile, “voluntary” (immigrant) minorities who have moved to the United States for better opportunities tend to accept as much of the mainstream culture and language as necessary to achieve their goal of settling in a new country. Ogbu and Simons (1998) asserted that the issue with mistrust of schools should be recognized as one of the explanations for the differences in school achievement between voluntary and involuntary minorities.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or non-profit sectors.

Notes on contributors

Sunun Park

Sunun Park holds a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA, and specializes in curriculum and instruction. Her research interests include curriculum development in multicultural education and social studies education, ethnic identity development, and civic engagement of ethnic minority students. She teaches courses as a Lecturer of the Dept. of Social Studies Education in the College of Education at Seoul National University, South Korea.

Youngdal Cho

Youngdal Cho is a Professor in the Faculty of Education and is leading the Research Center for Educational Policy in Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea. He was Dean of the College of Education at Seoul National University (2006-2010), president of the Korean Association of Anthropology of Education, and chair of the Korean Association of Multicultural Education. In the area of multicultural education, he was also a member of the OER committee at the National Institute of Education, Singapore. His research has focused on the micro-ethnography of lesson interaction in the classroom, citizenship education, and multicultural education. He has published numerous papers in ethnography in education and multicultural education such as “Understanding lesson interactions in the Korean classroom”, “Politics of making national curriculum in Korea”, and ‘Multicultural education in Korea: Theory and practices.’