By Chung Hyun-chae
The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education plans to shut down eight of the city’s 14 “autonomous” private high schools because they did not meet the academic criteria required to remain open.
“We’ve decided to revoke the licenses of the eight schools because they did not pass our evaluations,” Lee Keun-pyo, director general of the office’s educational policy bureau, said in a press briefing Monday.
He said the eight autonomous schools would be turned into ordinary schools.
Lee added that the office would officially announce the plan Thursday, saying it would also disclose the names of the schools it was closing.
However, the Ministry of Education said it would reject the decision to close the eight schools.
The ministry is likely to clash head-on with the education office over how to deal with the autonomous schools. This issue has already pitted liberal education superintendents against the conservative policymakers of the ministry.
Autonomous private schools are “elite” schools that the government grants greater independence to design their curricula; accordingly, the schools are financially independent from the government.
If they do not meet certain conditions as measured through evaluations every five years, they lose their status and are converted into general schools.
The decision comes after Cho Hee-yeon, a liberal educator, was elected the superintendent of the metropolitan education office in June. He has pledged to abolish the private elite high schools. He and other liberals say such schools widen the education gap among students from different socioeconomic backgrounds due to expensive tuition and arbitrary admission standards.
In July, Cho offered the schools 1.4 billion won ($1.3 million) in aid for the next five years in exchange for changing their status “voluntarily.”
The education office reached its decision after completing comprehensive evaluations of the schools.
“With the evaluations, we checked to see if the schools were offering an appropriate academic environment as an autonomous private high school and accordingly offering various curricula to develop students’ aptitudes,” Lee said.
The Seoul education office rated schools on a 100-point scale, with 70 being a passing grade.