Progressive Candidates' Pledges Risk Leveling Education Downward

Candidate registration for the June 3 local elections will take place over two days beginning Thursday. On Tuesday, so-called progressive superintendent candidates from 15 metropolitan and provincial education offices — including Seoul superintendent candidate Jung Keun-sik — gathered to unveil a set of joint campaign pledges. As part of what they described as a plan to "normalize" public education, they proposed introducing absolute grading for both the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) and high school transcripts, while abolishing autonomous private high schools, foreign language and international high schools for local students, collectively known as specialized high schools. Though framed as an effort to reduce educational inequality, the proposals raise concerns that they amount in practice to a rejection of academic competition itself and a push toward leveling education downward. To begin with, the proposals invite criticism for overstepping the legal authority of provincial and metropolitan superintendents. Changes to the college admissions system are, by law, to be determined by the presidentially-affiliated National Education Commission through long-term social consensus. Likewise, the criteria governing the abolition of autonomous private and specialized high schools are stipulated in the enforcement decree of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act — not matters that superintendents can alter at will. More fundamentally, it is difficult to understand the logic of dramatically weakening the discriminatory function of admissions exams through absolute grading, especially when no credible alternative has been presented. Put bluntly, unless every university plans to admit students by lottery, competition and differentiation in admissions are realities that cannot simply be wished away. It is worth recalling that the Moon Jae-in administration also pledged during the 2017 presidential campaign to adopt absolute grading for the CSAT, only to retreat to a far more cautious stance after taking office. In fact, after the admissions scandal involving the children of former Justice Minister Cho Kuk erupted, the administration moved in the opposite direction by increasing the share of regular admissions based on standardized test scores. The candidates are right to emphasize the importance of restoring public education. But that goal must not come at the expense of educational excellence. The attempt during the Moon administration to aggressively dismantle autonomous private high schools ultimately ran into court rulings, while triggering deep social division and significant policy costs.