[Editorial] Extracurricular work reporting system

Following the Constitutional Court`s ruling that the government`s decision to ban the extra-curriculum tuition was unconstitutional, the Education Ministry has come up with a new card of the abroad-the-cross reporting system. This is to obligate teachers for the extra-campus tuition to report their income arising from their teaching to the boards of education or national tax agencies, instead of overall permitting the tuitions out of the school campuses.

It seems that the education authorities are intending to a put psychological pressure on the people engaged in expensive out-of-campus tuition rather than to abide by the taxation principle that there should be tax-levying where is income.

In other words, the policy may have aimed at discouraging the high-cost tuition through making the flow of money between the teachers and parents transparent. The reason that the tuition fees were skyrocketing before the court ruling is ascribed to the closed tuition market to some degree. Since the tuition was secretly conducted under the legal ban, tuition fees were additionally raised, plus allowances for risks. If the expensive tuition reporting system is implemented, it will bring about an effect of opening its market and thereby the bubble of the tuition market will be eliminated.

However, this expected effect could be attained only when the tuition reporting system is carried out without hitch, as the authorities envisioned. But with a close examination of the contents of the announcing system, we cannot but raise some doubts over its efficacy. First of all, there is a high possibility that the subject people will not report the income to the National Tax Administration. If and when the related teachers and the students keep the tuition in secret, there is no way of finding the practice. In this case, the government measure could be rendered naught, disappointingly.

The Education Ministry has provided a penalty of 1 million won or less against the violators of the stipulations, but it is deemed necessary to introduce more severe punishments against them, if the ministry is determined to sweep out the unsavory practice, once and for all. This is because the teachers taking high tuition money will be prone to evading their income report.

We have some sympathy with the education authorities, as they are in an awkward situation due to their obligations to lift the tuition ban in line with the Constitutional Court`s verdict, on one hand, and to prohibit the controversial tuition practice in light of public sentiment, on the other. Nonetheless, it will be difficult to reap fruitful results under the present circumstances. This necessitates the authorities to hammer out the most effective and realistic policy steps, even if the system is postponed for some time.

If the public education becomes viable, the extra-curriculum schooling will gradually disappear. Even though there is a need for directly coping with the practice, the educational policy must weigh the improvement of quality of school teaching. To this end, the government is required to undertake massive investments in the educational sector.