I'm currently reading The Smartest Kids in the World: And how they got that way by Amanda Ripley, In this book, the author follows three American teenagers who spend a year in a foreign high school in three countries that have drastically improved their education systems - Finland, Korea, and Poland. In today's excerpt (pp 169-171), she wonders "what would happen in a true free market in which parents had real insight into the rigor of a school and the quality of the teachers....As far as I could tell, there was really only one place in the world with a true free market for education, where supply and demand determined prices, and customers had closer-to-perfect information." That one place, according to Ms Ripley, is the Korean hagwons (private tutoring academies). To illustrate how the hagwons work, she profiles Andrew Kim - a "$4 million teacher".
In Korea, Andrew Kim is a rock-star teacher who earned $4 million in 2010 - because "he was paid according to the demand for his skills, unlike most teachers world-wide. And he was in high demand... (
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