By Kim Rahn
High school teachers will be banned from working at schools their children attend, in a government countermeasure against possible exam leaks and school grade manipulation by the parents to their children.
The measure followed a recent allegation that a high school teacher in southern Seoul showed exam papers to his twin daughters who attend the school he teaches at.
According to the Ministry of Education, Sunday, the measure will go into effect next year.
In rural areas where there are only a few schools and such a separation is impossible, teachers will be excluded from school affairs related to their children's evaluations.
“We will recommend the measure and then the regional educational offices will revise their personnel affairs regulations to introduce it starting next March,” a ministry official said.
For private schools, the ministry asked the offices to come up with measures such as sending the teachers to other schools under the school foundation.
According to the ministry, 560 schools have teachers and their children as students nationwide, 23.7 percent of the total number of 2,360 high schools. Of the country's 17 regional educational offices, four have adopted systems in which if a teacher's child is assigned to the school where the parent teaches, the teacher is moved to another school nearby. But the remainder do not have any such regulations.
The government measure, however, is drawing complaint from educators.
“It's pity that the ministry is treating teachers as potential criminals,” Kim Seung-hwan, the superintendent at the North Jeolla Provincial Office of Education, said on Facebook. “Leaking exam papers to children or manipulating their school records are rare illegal activities committed by only a few teachers. Such activities can be prevented through harsher discipline or criminal charges.”
Kim pointed out that the regional educational offices cannot directly take disciplinary action against teachers at private schools, saying revising the laws on private schools must come first.
Parents were not satisfied with the ministry announcement as well; they rather demanded the regulation be adopted at elementary and middle schools as well.
In Seoul, it was recently alleged that a teacher leaked exams to his twin daughters and they topped the recent final test. The regional educational office launched a special inspection into the teacher and the school.
Last year there were two cases where teachers at two schools in Gyeonggi Province fabricated the school records of their children who attended the schools where they were teaching.