Why in Korea Can Make Schooling with Social Justice? an Analysis on Results from 2013 Talis

Korea is among the OECD’s top-performing countries in PISA and has positive equity indicators for 15-year-olds. Performance of students was above average in mathematics, reading and science in PISA 2012. Korea also had the largest share of top performers in the OECD in mathematics in 2012, with 30.9% of students at or above Level 5 (compared to the OECD average of 12.6%) and the lowest share of low performers, with 9.1% of students below proficiency Level 2 (compared to the OECD average of 23.0%). Despite being a consistently high performer in all PISA cycles, Korea has still improved continuously in reading and science, with unchanged performance in mathematics. Socio-economic background had less impact on student performance than the OECD average in PISA 2012, and this has been the case since PISA 2003. Korean students were also the top performers in the OECD for creative problem-solving in PISA 2012(OECD, 2016: 6). The above results present that students whether or not come from advantage or disadvantage family can have the similar education quality. Around 96% of students or more in Korea attend schools whose principals reported that learning is not at all or very little hindered by teachers having to teach students of diverse ethnic backgrounds within the same class (OECD, 2013: 177). And only in Korea were public schools able to attract more advantaged students in 2012 than they did in 2003 (OECD, 2013: 145). This paper would like to explore the reasons why in Korea can make more equality education more other countries in OECD. The paper will make some conclusions and suggestions to be references for education policy to achieve social justice.