The Smartest Kids in the World by Amanda Ripley

a fifteen-year prison sentence. The judge, citing mitigating circumstances, sentenced the boy to three and a half years.
    Meanwhile, Korean politicians vowed anew to treat the country’s education fever, as it was called. Under Lee’s tenure, the ministry had hired and trained 500 admissions officers to help the country’s universities select applicants the way U.S. universities did, which is to say, based on something other than just test scores.
    Almost overnight, however, new hagwons cropped up to help students navigate the new alternative admissions scheme.Hundreds of students were accused of lying about their hometowns to get preferential spots reserved for underprivileged rural families. One parent fabricated a divorce to take advantage of a preference for single-parent children. The fever raged on.
    The country’s leaders worried that unless the rigid hierarchy started to nurture more innovation, economic growth would stall and fertility rates would continue to decline as families felt the pressure of paying for all that tutoring.
    To retroactively improve public schools, so that parents would feel less need for hagwons, Lee tried to improve teaching. Korea already hadhighly educated elementary school teachers, relative to the United States and most countries. Korean elementary teachers came from just a dozen universities that admittedthe top 5 percent of applicants, and they were well trained. Middle school teachers-in-training in Korea performed at thetop of the world on a mathematics testadministered in six countries, trouncing future teachers in the United States.
    Korea’s high-school teachers were not as impressive, however. During a shortage of teachers decades earlier, the government had made afateful mistake, allowing too many colleges to train secondary teachers. Those 350 colleges had lower standards than the elementary training programs. Like the more than 1,000 teacher-training colleges in the United States, the Korean programs churned out far more teachers-to-be than the country needed. Teacher preparation was a lucrative industry for colleges, but the lower standards made the profession less prestigious and less effective. Because, as one Korean policymaker famously said, “Thequality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.”
    To elevate the profession, Lee rolled out a new teacher evaluation scheme to give teachers useful feedback and hold them accountable for results. Under the new system, teachers were evaluated in part by their own students and their parents, who filled out online surveys, as well as other teachers, an approach meant to approximate the 360-degree review used in many businesses. (Unlike the model used by many U.S. districts, Korea’s teacher evaluation scheme did not include student test-score growth; officials I talked to seemed to want to use this data, but they didn’t know how to assign accountability, since so many students had multiple teachers, including outside tutors, instructing them in the same subjects.)
    Under Korea’s new rules, low-scoring teachers were supposed to be retrained. But, as in U.S. districts where reformers have tried imposing similar strategies, teachers and their unions fought back, calling the evaluations degrading and unfair. Pretty policies on paper turned toxic in practice. As a form of protest, some Korean teachers gave all their peers the highest possible reviews. In 2011,less than 1 percent of Korea’s teachers were actually sent for retraining, andsome simply refused to go.
    After his first year in office, one of Lee’s biggest accomplishmentswas that spending on hagwons had declined. The figures wentdown just 3.5 percent, but he considered it a major victory nonetheless.
    Listening to Lee, I realized that the rest of the world could learn as much from what worked in Korea as from what didn’t work. First, countries could change. That was hopeful. Korea had raised its expectations for what kids could do