North Korea’s education authorities have rolled out surprise inspections of school classes through teacher training centers ahead of their mid-year program review. Teachers are bristling at what they call excessive interference.
A South Hwanghae Province source told Daily NK recently that earlier this month, provincial education authorities issued a special directive: “Under provincial training center guidance, local teacher retraining centers must make unannounced visits to schools in their jurisdictions to inspect teachers’ instructional materials and observe classes.”
The directive coincides with the Education Commission’s mid-year teacher assessments and appears aimed at evaluating teacher competence and revising pay grades.
Constant surveillance
Teacher retraining centers don’t just provide professional development for educators across all school levels—they also conduct year-round spot checks on classroom instruction. They use these audits as a pretext for unannounced classroom inspections to evaluate each teacher’s performance and adjust pay grades accordingly.
“Instructors from the training centers frequently show up at schools unannounced to observe classes, cross-check lesson plans and pacing charts, and scrutinize everything from teaching equipment to attendance registers,” the source explained. “Teachers who normally coast through their lessons get flagged by the centers, called into the principal’s office, and live in constant fear of being humiliated in front of their colleagues.”
The pressure has created a culture of last-minute scrambling. “In principle, lesson plans should be rewritten every three years, but since textbooks rarely change, most teachers don’t bother,” the source said. “So when inspectors show up, it’s common to see teachers pulling all-nighters to draft new plans from scratch.”
A system that fails to motivate
While these audits are supposedly designed to assess teachers’ abilities and assign pay grades, the grading system itself provides little real incentive for classroom educators.
Teacher pay in North Korea is divided into five grades, but the monthly salary differences between grades are so minimal they barely affect living standards. This leaves most teachers largely indifferent to the entire evaluation process.
“Even if they ace the evaluations and get promoted, it doesn’t make much difference to their daily lives, so teachers simply don’t care,” the source noted. “Unless someone is specifically aiming to become a principal, most are completely indifferent to the grading system.”
Education authorities may use the grading system to try spurring competition and improving teacher performance, but for those actually in the classroom, pay grades lost their meaning long ago.
Growing resentment
The constant oversight is breeding resentment rather than improvement. “When instructors from the training centers show up, they pester teachers with questions and nitpick every detail,” the source said. “Teachers see them as nothing more than censorship bodies. The constant inspections and needless meddling only deepen everyone’s exhaustion.”
“In this kind of atmosphere, official slogans about ‘creative teaching methods’ or ‘improving education quality’ inevitably ring completely hollow.”
Translated by Kyungmin Kim.
