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Assessing the Failure of Korea’s Gifted and Talented Education Policy: The Role of New Public Management in Policy Delivery
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Abstract
The Korean Gifted and Talented Policy was initiated during the country's new public administration reform, set against the backdrop of a financial crisis. Its primary aim was to promote elitist education and cultivate individuals who could contribute positively to society. This policy replaced a thirty-year-old system of educational equalization in Korea, propelling the nation’s education onto a highly competitive trajectory. Korea's gifted and talented policy has contributed to economic development through educational reform, to some extent due to the cultivation of human resources. However, this study argues that under the principles of New Public Management, the policy has had largely negative results, increasing the inequality of educational resources, shifting the burden of educational costs onto students and families, and even becoming one of the factors influencing the decline in fertility in Korea. The study concludes that the policy has failed to some extent. The announcement by the Korean Ministry of Education that all private high schools, elite high schools, etc. will be abolished by 2025 and will return to being general high schools, somewhat announces the end of Korea's gifted and talented policy. The policy is influenced by the diversity of factors in policy development and the complexity of policy implementation, which increases the difficulty of its policy delivery. At the same time, issues such as performance in the New Public Management principles and the transfer of costs to students' families after the introduction of private capital add to the difficulty of policy implementation in this process. The findings of this paper provide new critical perspectives on the development of education policies by stakeholders, and in particular, provide valuable insights for analyzing the effectiveness of education policies in Korea, and the challenges faced in their implementation.
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How to cite this paper
Assessing the Failure of Korea’s Gifted and Talented Education Policy: The Role of New Public Management in Policy Delivery
How to cite this paper: Zhuoya Ren. (2024). Assessing the Failure of Korea’s Gifted and Talented Education Policy: The Role of New Public Management in Policy Delivery. The Educational Review, USA, 8(9), 1156-1162.
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.26855/er.2024.09.010
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