Opinion polls show that South Koreans view teachers as high-status professionals who make greater contributions to society than any other professionals.
South Korea does two things to raise the status of teaching as a profession. First, it makes entry to teacher training very selective. Teachers are recruited from the top 5 percent of each cohort graduate from their school system. Second, teachers are paid starting salaries of 141 percent of GDP per capita, which is significantly above the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average of 95 percent.
Making teacher training selective and paying teachers high starting salaries attracts the strongest candidates to the teaching profession, which is important because teacher quality significantly impacts student outcomes.
South Korea is able to pay teachers high starting salaries because it employs relatively fewer teachers than other nations. As a result, the student-teacher ratio in South Korea is 30:1, compared to the OECD average of 17:1.
It’s a smart tradeoff because studies show that teacher quality has significantly more impact on student outcomes than class size. Dollar for dollar, it’s better to attract a small number of outstanding teachers with high starting salaries than to attract a large number of mediocre teachers with small starting salaries—even if that means having a high student-teacher ratio. And that’s exactly what South Korea does.