School evaluation policies and systems in Korea: A challenge of social validation

For school evaluation policies and systems in Korea to be effective, they need to have social validity. This paper reviews the historical context of school evaluation policy development, school evaluation system design, and critical factors contributing to the implementation of the policy from the perspective of social validity. The results showed that the school evaluation policy has been evolving continuously. Although the central government and local education offices have spent much time and energy on the development of policies and systems, implementation has been slow and rocky. In addition, the overall school evaluation policy is still facing several problems, including the lack of utilization of achievement data, the need to further improve the quality of evaluator judgments, and the need to continuously validate evaluation indexes. Despite such problems, evaluation of school quality has become an important component of school accountability, which is an aspect of education increasingly demanded by tax-payers. The development in the last 15 years can be understood as a slow, arduous but steady process of social validation toward a consensual school evaluation policy and system.