Who have fallen behind? The educational reform toward differentiated learning opportunities and growing educational inequality in South Korea

Abstract

The Korean education has gone considerable reforms since the early 2000s toward more individualized and differentiated learning opportunities. We examine how students’ math performance changed in the midst of the educational reform. The OLS regression shows that the overall level of math performance deteriorated among 10th graders educated in the reformed system than their counterparts before the reform. The performance disparity by family SES increased after the reform. The quantile regression analysis offers additional insights: the declining performance after the reform was notable among low-achieving students, while the stronger influence of family SES appeared among students scoring on/above the median.