Emily Son - Week One Card News
According to the reporter Yeji Jang of Hankyoreh News, one student attending a foreign language high school in Seoul remarked that their school created an individual website for classes.
On the contrary, many others at general high schools were required to to take courses through the official EBS website which often crashed due an overflow of users. It was hence a challenge for students who were not privileged enough to attend special purpose high schools to fully access the resources, especially technology, necessary for studying during the pandemic.
Additionally, because special purpose high schools have higher tuitions, the socioeconomic divide was evident in the educational field. According to a study led by Professor Joohee Lee of Ewha Womans University, the quality of education differed immensely by the type of school, and such schools solely focused on recognizing and supporting students with high performances. The socioeconomic backgrounds of students were an important factor that aggravated the gap in the quality of education during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Such an educational divide existed before COVID-19, as proven by PISA 2018 (OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment). Students of the middle and lower class (with parents who received secondary education) showed larger drops in mathematics performance than those of the higher class (with parents who received tertiary education) did.
Dr. Soo-yong Byun of Pennsylvania State University further explained this situation in a book he co-wrote, “In recent years, the academic achievement of the poor has decreased significantly, resulting in the gap in academic achievement between classes to widen.”
It is of utmost importance to recognize and address such issues that resulted from socioeconomic differences, as they will continue to be pressing issues even as society recovers from the pandemic and slowly returns to pre-COVID life.
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