Is the United States Losing Its Status as a Reference Point for Educational Policy in the Age of Global Comparison? The Case of South Korea

This paper seeks to contribute to recent comparative discussions about the shift of traditional referential points as a result of new global governance by the OECD through PISA. In doing so, the authors investigate whether the lower PISA rankings of the US have resulted in the shifting of its referential status in South Korea. For the purposes of analysis, media representation of US education in South Korea is analysed by using two disparate newspapers from two time periods: three years before the first PISA release in 2001 and three years after 2009. This paper uses media discourses as primary data, but it also considers other complementary data such as policy documents and government policy statements on education. Recently, global governance through comparative data has become more significant, but the results of this study suggest that one should be careful about oversimplification. The results of this study imply that the pattern of external referencing in media representation hinges on historical, political, and cultural experiences rather than purely evidence-based discourses, at least in the case of South Korea.

Keywords: Policy borrowing; comparative education; external policy referencing; Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

The international framing of policy matters in domestic education discussions has become so common that virtually no reform proposals seem to gain political legitimacy without reference to the reform plans pursued in other nations. Of particular note in this regard is the role played by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The OECD has consistently produced and considerably expanded knowledge about the comparative international performance of education systems around the world, as well as key features of successful nations' education systems. In particular, the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has contributed powerfully to the emergence of a 'global education policy field' (Lingard, [34]) wherein policy makers situated in different national contexts constantly interact with each other and draw on information and comparative indicators produced by the OECD (Grek, [9]; Wiseman, [52]). Through such transnational networks of policy actors, an international consensus on 'best practice' and an appropriate 'reform model' has been generated and globally disseminated, particularly among the advanced industrial economies.

This unprecedented growth of comparative and international knowledge about education has not only promoted transnational policy learning, but it has also changed the pattern of policy borrowing (Lingard, [34]). Wiseman ([52]), for instance, suggests that the wider availability of international data on national education systems has shifted the pattern of policy borrowing, leading to the trend where external policy referencing becomes 'not geographically or politically bounded but ... instead bounded by the extent of the legitimated evidence' (p. 18). Hence, as Lingard ([34]) rightly argues, this emergence of a 'global policy field' has resulted in 'new processes of externalization and policy borrowing and the reconstitution of reference societies for national education systems' (p. 369).

A case in point here is the way that Finnish education, which had been virtually unknown to the international community of education policy makers until its first successful evaluation in PISA (2000), had thereafter been featured in many national education reform debates. Also, Germany is no longer looking exclusively to Sweden, its traditional source of educational innovations, nor Australia to the United Kingdom and the United States for new reform ideas and policy justification (Takayama, Waldow, & Sung, [46]). The recent education reform discussion in these nations has been inundated with references to the Finnish PISA success, though remarkably different implications are drawn in terms of domestic consumption (see Takayama et al., [46]). Hence, the release of international league tables compiled from scientifically rigorous comparative data sets has shifted the pattern of international policy borrowing or lesson drawing for many countries.

Though the considerable influence of PISA on national education policy discourses has been documented in Asian nations (Lee, [32]; Sung, [44]; Waldow, Takayama, & Sung [50]), it is important to note that the United States (US) has traditionally been the primary source of educational innovations for many Asian nations despite its mediocre standings in many international assessments, including those of PISA. The US's post-war political, economic, and military influence in the region—although declining in recent years, along with a rise of a new Chinese hegemony—has certainly played a role in these nations' active borrowing of or referencing to US educational thoughts and policy ideas. This trend is particularly notable in East Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea, nations that have been under the US's strong influence throughout their post-war histories. Consequently, the education reform debates in these nations have been inundated with policy references to US education reform plans (Sung, [44]). Though American educational thoughts and policy ideas are constantly negotiated in the domestic political debates over education reform, US education has long acted as the key point of reference, either to legitimise or delegitimise newly proposed reform ideas, in many East Asian nations.

This historically prominent role of US education in South Korean education policy discourses poses a question about the earlier discussion of the powerful influence of PISA on the change of the referential patterns in education policy borrowing. If the earlier discussion holds any water, then the policy references to US education in South Korea should have considerably declined in recent years as PISA has come to dominate much of the domestic education reform discussion. Hence, by closely examining the trajectory of media references to US education in South Korea as one representative East Asian nation, this study aims to test the existing assumptions regarding PISA's international influence in shaping referential patterns in education policy. At the same time, we also examine which policies have actually been changed by borrowing from or making reference to US education, because media discourses themselves do not always reflect actual policy changes. Hence, this paper uses media discourses as primary data, but it also considers other complementary data such as policy documents and government policy statements on education.

This paper has two main objectives. First, it investigates if the lower PISA rankings of the US ever resulted in it losing its referential status in South Korea. Hence, we examine and compare the patterns of media representation of borrowing from or making reference to US education in both the pre-PISA and post-PISA eras. However, the media cannot be said to be a completely accurate representation of the functions of an entire society. The reliability of media messages is always contested among different groups, many of whom are competing to express their preferred meaning as the representative definition. Thus, this study selected two disparate newspapers to compare how they represent US education in the externalisation process.

In much of the literature, it is assumed that policy referencing is part of the rational activity of imitating, copying, and modifying a policy model (Rose, [38]). Based on this perspective, referencing the policy innovations of other countries or the efforts to draw lessons from a referential point can be identified as part of a learning process. The learning occurs in 'global policy fields' (Lingard, [34]). It entails a cognitive process in which people involved in policy-borrowing discourses attempt to use logic and rationality in the process of selecting and modifying the targeted policy. Policy borrowing is a purposeful action. This leads to the discussion of what Wiseman ([52]) has called the best-practice approach. Wiseman ([52]) argues that the tendency of the recent referencing pattern is clearly 'evidence based rather than based on intuition or belief' (p. 2). If this argument is sound, the powerful influence of PISA should not have allowed for US education, which has consistently ranked near or below the OECD average, to be the key referential point of education reform debates in many countries. One would predict that US education would no longer be the primary 'reference society' in other nations, replaced instead by other top-performing nations in the PISA league tables such as Finland. Hence, what needs to be examined is if the US actually lost its referential status in the post-PISA era because of its lower PISA rankings. With this aim in mind, this study employs the method of analysing media representations at two time periods: the pre-PISA and post-PISA eras.

Based on this objective, the analysis of the media representations of US education in South Korea is guided by the following questions:

• (1) What policies, if any, have actually been changed or created by borrowing from or making reference to US education in the pre-PISA and post-PISA eras?
• (2) What are the changes in frequencies and patterns of media referencing of US education between the pre-PISA and post-PISA eras?
• (3) Have the lower PISA rankings of the US ever resulted in the shifting of its referential status? What local conditions have influenced the patterns of referencing or the refusal to follow US education reforms?

Analysing the media representations of the reference society is a useful way to examine which messages are accentuated in borrowing discourses, and what policy changes are actually legitimised or refused based on media attention (Waldow et al., [50]). Media, as a key site of educational debates, is essential to understanding how important policy actors scandalise domestic educational problems, form a sense of crisis, and support rationales for government policymaking. Referencing other countries' model policies in the media becomes a major part of this process. Through the process of policy borrowing and referencing, policy makers intend to strengthen the legitimacy of reform proposals and provide an expectation that they are able to adopt the best practices from model countries.

The media not only distributes the information on particular educational policies, but also influences the government's policymaking by generating news articles, columns, and op-eds in a particular way. The media often identifies the crisis of a country's future and looks for solutions, while at the same time allowing for politicians to take advantage of the same crisis for their own political and ideological purposes (Ungerleider, [49]). In this process, governments play a crucial role in not only feeding sources of news to the media, but also in utilising media for agenda setting. In other words, governments advance their own agendas using the space of newspapers. Among various communications with the news media, press releases and policy documents are the most important tools for the government in order to ensure that the media will produce news addressing the issues in the way that the government expects and desires (Ungerleider, [49]).

Since various media frame their presentations in accordance with their own political inclinations, reviewing two newspapers with disparate political orientations in this allows for the provision of a more comprehensive understanding of the local contexts where external policy referencing is mediated by domestic political contestation. The government provides a source of stories to news media but cannot necessarily control it because each news source has its own readers who may think differently from the ones of other news media. Because of this, some newspapers are more likely to be supportive of a particular government's policy when its readership has more in common with the incumbent government. As Cohen ([7]) points out, despite their claims to be unbiased in reporting the news, the media produce and circulate meanings to gain public consent for or undermine the government's educational policies. Likewise, Anderson ([2]) argues that the media contribute to the creation of social consent on particular educational reforms by constructing points of view, perceptions, anxieties, aspirations, and strategies to endorse or undermine specific education policies, practices, and ideologies. The news media are basically a political entity, because the government largely depends on them for its communications with the electorate (Levin, [33]). It should be noted that readers of the newspapers are the very electorate. Therefore, the representation of educational policies in the news media is at the core of political processes and communications.

In this paper, media discourses are used as primary data with other complementary data such as policy documents and government policy statements. The use of this strategy is expected to allow for better analysis of the intersections between media representation and actual government policies. First of all, two print media sources in South Korea with different political orientations were chosen, one conservative, and the other progressive: the influential conservative Dong-A Daily, and the leading progressive Hankyoreh News.[1] With regards to the media dates, three years (1998–2000) before the first publication of the PISA testing in 2000, and a more recent three-year period (2009–2011) were chosen as the time periods for the analysis because this research project is interested in the shift, if any, of the US's referential status due to the PISA results. At least two things were considered when choosing the time period from 2009 to 2011 for that of recent years. First, nationally, it was in the year 2009 that there was a 'great debate' in South Korea on neoliberal educational policies as part of the aftermath of the Lee Myung-Bak administration's (2008–2013) market-based reforms, which had profound effects on public schooling. Second, as an internationally-relevant consideration, the year 2009 is when Shanghai, China, participated for the first time in PISA. The results of PISA 2009 were released in 2010, expanding the discussion about global league tables and broadening interest in 'looking East' (Lingard, [34]; Tucker, [48]). Right after PISA 2009 and its release the next year, global governance using data from the test results was much more at the centre of international and comparative education analysis, popular discourses and news media attention (Lingard, [34]; Sahlberg, [40]; Tucker, [48]; Wiseman, [52]).

We accessed the databases of the two target newspapers and searched articles for the keywords 'US education' for a span of six years. The selection criterion of the articles was whether they included substantial content, rather than passing sentences, referring to US education that were intended to evaluate, legitimise, or refute particular practices, agendas, policies, or arguments. Articles on higher education and other areas outside of elementary and secondary education were not included in the data for analysis.

Articles were categorised into either positive, neutral, or negative in their representation of US education. We, the two authors of this paper, worked together to create a codebook which includes the rules for classifying each article. In order to ensure consistency in the decision-making process, we each conducted content analysis individually and compared the results. When our results of the decisions were different from each other's, we reached an agreement through discussion.

Along with media data, government policy documents and policy statements on education in the same periods were also examined. It is important that media data be complemented by other data from the government because media discourses often do not result in the implementation of real policies. Media representation itself often cannot fully explain what policy is really created or changed by borrowing from or making reference to US education. The government policy documents are carefully written to make the government's original message available to the public, and so they are the touchstone of actual policy changes. Government policy statements on education often include discourses on policy borrowing and references to other country's model policies to gain legitimacy for newly-proposed policies or policy changes. Therefore, government documents are crucial data when examining the shape of actual policy procedures and their relationships with media discourses.

US education has always played a role as an important source of policy borrowing for South Korea. There is a tendency whereby the targets of policy borrowing or referencing have been changing from open education in the pre-PISA era to an accountability system in the post-PISA era. Accountability discourse was introduced even before the PISA era, but it was not until the 2000s that the accountability system led to the development of actual policies.

In the pre-PISA era, the most significant government policy in South Korea was 'open education reform'. Open education was a major part of the influential May 31st Education Reform of Yeong-Sam Kim's government (1993–1998) enacted in 1995. Open education in South Korea was introduced as a means of orienting the principles of classroom teaching reforms towards individualisation, promotion of students' choices, and performance assessment. It is important to note that there has been a somewhat dismal self-perception of South Korean education in that the competition-based system is often regarded as problematic due to the traditional school culture of rote memorisation and lecture-based direct teaching. Open education arose as a result of this self-perception of an overly-competitive schooling system based on the test-driven school culture. The tone of many articles (Ahn, [1]; Hong, [13]; Lee, [30]) in both newspapers from this time period was that the US system was the ideal point of reference, and that South Korea could learn from it. The open education system intended to make pedagogic practice more responsive to students' choices and diversity, as was believed to be the case with US education. Open education brought about a national curriculum change, individualised learning methods and performance assessment as opposed to traditional test-driven practices. The government describes the goal of the open education policy as follows (Korean Educational Development Institute, [20]).

• • Individualisation (individualisation of contents, teaching methods, learning speed, and evaluation).
• • Autonomy (allowance of the right to choose, self-paced learning).
• • Teaching and learning with active interaction (students' engagement and teacher's constructivist role).
• • Diversity (differentiation of learning contents, learning strategy, teaching materials, and classroom environment).
• • Performance assessment (open-ended evaluation, achievement standards, portfolio, and authentic tasks).

During the decade before the first PISA release, an influential education policy, referencing the US education, was curriculum reform Korean (Korean Institute of Curriculum and Evaluation, 2008). This reform was realised through the 7th national curriculum revision in 1997, of which the main element was high school electives. The high school electives were designed to provide students with more chances to choose particular subject matters based on their own preferences. The 7th national curriculum required all of the high schools to provide the elective curriculum to 11th and 12th graders. Before the 7th revision of the national curriculum, high schools had little autonomy to operate their own school curriculums. The 7th revised national curriculum guideline delegates some power to both schools and students in determining some subject matters, even though the choices were only allowed within the limits of the state-fixed list of electives. In this process, the Korean Institute of Curriculum and Evaluation (2008), the government's think tank, often used the case of US high school electives to gain support for the new national curriculum revision.

In the post-PISA era, the most controversial debate on US education in South Korea was over teacher evaluation. Accountability discourses were first borrowed in the mid-1990s, but actual policies only began to be realised in the mid-2000s. The accountability system brought about a teacher evaluation system aligned with performance-based bonus pay. The Korean government introduced the performance-based incentives, creating fundamental changes in the teacher compensation system. After examining the teacher evaluation process and the performance-based pay system, Lee ([29]) regards these policies as the result of borrowing from neoliberal reform ideas, largely from the US, as part of a global rise of the evaluative state. However, the performance-based bonus programme is at odds with the traditional view of the teacher in South Korea. Although the perception of teaching as a profession has been gradually changing, many Korean teachers maintain their unique pride in the sense that they do not want to compete with their colleagues for money.

The cases of teacher evaluation and merit pay in US education are often used to back up the legitimacy of the policy. The system was legitimised by the government's statements on the policy, and the government officials' columns in the journals from a government think tank, the Korean Educational Development Institute. The South Korean government introduced the cases of various countries, but US education tended to come first as a model of performance-based bonus pay aligned with teacher evaluation. Under this programme, each school was to divide teachers into two groups, a bonus-eligible group (70% of the teachers) and a no-bonus group (30% of the teachers), based on individual teacher performance as rated by the principal. Using these rules, the bonus-eligible group of teachers was divided into first, second, and third levels and got 150%, 100%, and 50% one-time bonuses, respectively (Korean Ministry of Education, [22]). As of 2016, the allocation rule in this teacher incentive pay programme has changed a little such that all of the teachers are eligible for the bonus, but the top 30% are given as much as two times more than the bottom 30% (Korean Ministry of Education, [25]). The government claimed that the plan could motivate teachers to improve their performance in order to earn the bonus. In 2009, the government added another aspect of competition between schools for a greater bonus based on the results of school-level evaluation. The Korean Teachers' Union (KTU) strongly opposed the plan and boycotted the programme on the grounds that teacher performance is not something to be objectively measured, and that it would intensify the test-score obsession in teaching (Lee, [32]).

Along with teacher evaluation and performance-based bonus pay, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in the US has clearly been borrowed by South Korea in the post-PISA era. The subtitle of the government document for this plan is The Plan for Zero Students Left Behind, almost directly named after the American counterpart (Korean Ministry of Education, [24]). Before 2008, there had also been a national standardised test in South Korea, but it was not that controversial because the test's goal was different, aiming at producing information about overall student achievement by sampling less than 5% of all students. However, national testing has been administered since after 2008 as a significant complement to the accountability system, including mandatory testing for all students along with publication of the results on an official website. Information in the report includes the proportion of students at each of the four levels: extraordinary, satisfactory, foundational, and below standard. It is particularly interesting that the government explained that this four-level reporting format was directly modelled after the US's NCLB (Sung & Kang, [45]).

Many proponents of choice in schools have also frequently referred to US school choice policies. School choice in South Korea is understood as a revision or abolition of the High School Equalization Policy. This policy began in 1974 in order to avoid overheated examination competition and to promote equality between high schools (Seth, [42]). Under this system, students were randomly assigned to schools according to their home address. As a result, each school had as heterogeneous a student body as possible. School choice is at odds with the High School Equalization Policy because choice implies the ability to compete for admission to the preferred schools in South Korea. As a consequence of such school choice discourses, the upper-middle class parents have backed the expansion of school choice, showing a demand for elite school choice options. In this process, US choice theorists Chubb and Moe's ([6]) argument is often cited by educational scholars and commentators in South Korea as an idea that can be used in support of avoiding the HSEP. In 2008, South Korean government began the High School 300 Project, which is designed to increase school choice options by establishing new high schools or opting out of existing high schools and moving into new ones. The schools include 100 autonomous private high schools, 150 public boarding schools (in underdeveloped regions), and 50 vocational craftsmen schools (Korean Ministry of Education, [23]).

In South Korea, US education continues to be the key referential point through which domestic education policy agendas are either legitimised or rejected. Compared to the period (1998–2000) before the first publication of the PISA results, US education received the most media attention in the relatively more recent three-year period (2009–2011). The number of conservative Dong-A Daily articles referencing US education in 2009–2011 was double the corresponding number from 1998–2000 (Figure 1), while the number of Hankyoreh News articles increased by a relatively small margin (Figure 2). As detailed below, the increase in the conservative media's references to US education has much to do with the election of the conservative Lee Myung-Bak administration (2008–2013), which actively pursued a set of market-driven educational policies.

Graph: Figure 1. The number of Dong-A Daily articles referencing US education during 1998–2000 and 2009–2011.

Graph: Figure 2. The number of Hankyoreh News articles referencing US education during 1998–2000 and 2009–2011.

As a result of these administrative changes, most Dong-A Daily articles were positive (56%) or at least neutral (11%) towards US education. The targets of reference vary, encompassing educational reforms (e.g. Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind Act, and Race to the Top), important figures and their initiatives (e.g. President Barak Obama, Michelle Lee, and Arne Duncan), and specific educational policies (e.g. home schooling, charter schools, and teacher merit pay). For example, some writers (Hong, [12]; Kim, [16]) of the Dong-A Daily depicted US President Obama as assertive in denouncing teachers' unions for their resistance to the expansion of school choice, and to the idea of rewarding excellent teachers with extra pay. The relatively few negative references to US education in this newspaper have to do with school violence, school shootings, and high drop-out rates. However, the imagery of US education as the source of educational inspiration and innovation has been rarely challenged at all. It is also notable that this conservative newspaper described US education as a positive example to learn from much more frequently in 2009–2011 than in 1998–2000. This indicates that the positive referential status of US education within a Korean conservative newspaper has not diminished at all, clearly not being influenced very substantially by the results of the relatively poor PISA performance of US students.

Alternatively, about a quarter of the articles from the Hankyoreh News are positive towards US education. What is interesting, though, is that the targets of positive referencing in this newspaper are different from the counterparts represented in the Dong-A Daily articles. Hankyoreh News tends to regard the positive aspects of US education referred to by the Dong-A Daily as negative ones. The cases include market-based accountability policies such as national testing, teacher merit pay, and the NCLB act, which were evaluated as failed reforms by writers of the Hankyoreh News. In addition, some articles pointed out that US education is not a good model to follow when considering its educational problems of segregation, school crime, unequal distribution of educational opportunity, and low achievement. However, in spite of the overall negative tone against US education reform agendas, articles from the Hankyoreh News still actively referred to different aspects of US education as positive in order to strengthen their arguments in favour of introducing affirmative action, student-centred classrooms, multicultural education, care for at-risk students, cooperative teaching methods, and alternative schools (Koh, [19]; Lee, [30]; Rue, [39]).

Despite the different accentuation of US education, it is clear in both newspapers that the referential status of US education has not abated at all. In fact, it has often gained more references. This clearly contradicts, at least in the South Korean case of the news media, the observation that PISA has radically changed the referential pattern in education policymaking (Lingard, [34]; Tucker, [48]; Wiseman, [52]).

America's image in South Korea has always been mediated by real policy changes contextualised in local issues and controversial debates. More generally, local historical and political conditions have influenced the pattern of referencing or rejecting a particular nation's education reforms. Newspapers' selections and displays of news topics are closely related to the issues and debates at a given time period, and even decide the number of articles to be published on the various issues.

Though opinions on open education differed even within the same newspaper, several articles in the conservative Dong-A Daily raised concerns about open education. For instance, a strong opponent of open education (Hwang, [14]) argued that 'South Korea should not accept an illusion of American progressive education' and attributed the failure of US education to progressive intentions and a focus on child-centred classroom culture. Then, he went on to defend the competition-based Korean education system, maintaining that 'there is no way to survive without competition when considering the South Korean situation under International Monetary Fund (IMF) control'. In the same pages, another columnist (Hong, [13]) questioned US progressive schooling as a model for South Korean education. He argued that 'US education has been based on John Dewey-led progressivism dominating most American classrooms', further stating that 'progressive education is currently questioned in the US because of its achievement crisis'. He also explained that 'President Clinton's warning in the Goals 2000 to close the failing schools is juxtaposed with the criticism of the progressives' disregard for subject-matter knowledge'.

In contrast, open education is framed in a very different way in the progressive Hankyoreh News articles. Most writers engaged in the discussion on this issue conceptualise open education not only as opposed to uniform lecture-based education, but also as a new tool to fix Korean public schooling. Interestingly, existing public schooling is framed as 'closed education' in which test-driven teaching dominates classroom learning, while an alternative is depicted as 'open education', which is perceived as a way in which students are encouraged to develop various views and voices in the classroom (Lee, [30]), to engage with social problems (Kwon, [26]), and to be participatory decision-makers in the learning process (Ahn, [1]). It was not uncommon that articles in progressive media often featured open education as potentially dismantling the undemocratic and bureaucratic educational administration. Some writers (Kwon, [54]; Rue, [39]; Yoon, [54]) from the Hankyoreh News referred to magnet schools, progressive charter schools, home schooling (not with religious motives but with a progressive ideal),[2] and alternative schools as something to learn from the US in the struggle against bureaucratic public school regulation, which was thought of as being part of the negative legacy from the military dictatorship in South Korea. Some articles (e.g. Rue, [39]; Yoon, 1999) also used some successful school cases (e.g. progressive charter schools) from US education to legitimate their arguments for open education (see Table 1).

Table 1. Media representation of US education during 1998–2000.

As stated above, the pattern of referencing or rejecting US education is mediated by the domestic media's agenda-setting of what is to be selected as important media coverage at a given time period. During 2009–2011, the conditions for referencing US education were related to real educational policies that were being enacted, such as national testing, school choice, and the accountability system (see Table 2).

Table 2. Media representation of US education during 2009–2011.

As concerns national testing issues, articles from the Dong-A Daily were hostile to the KTU, which vehemently opposed the testing. Twelve KTU teachers were dismissed in 2008 for refusing to administer the test, bringing about a collision between progressive educators and the conservative media. For example, an article in this newspaper criticised the KTU, saying that 'schools with more KTU teachers turned out, as a result of national testing, to have lower achievement levels, and this is the hidden reason behind the KTU's vehement objection to the testing' (Woh, [53]). Articles on NCLB in this newspaper positively represented the policy, suggesting that it contributed to closing the achievement gap, increasing test scores, holding teachers accountable, and enhancing public school quality in the US.

In sharp contrast, Lee (2009) from the Hankyoreh News highlighted the negative aspects of NCLB in the US, stating that 'even the American Educational Research Association criticized the NCLB in terms of insufficient finances for the failing schools, unrealistic goal setting, further segregation, and exacerbating the problems of American public schooling'. Other articles on NCLB in this newspaper emphasised its negative effects, saying that 'too much testing through the NCLB can never be a barometer of the improvement of lives of poor students in the US' (Youh, [55]), and in further condemnation, claiming that 'US national testing is a culmination of neo-liberalism having the consequence of publicizing the failing schools, inflating the testing business, and institutionalizing competition in human life' (Han, [10]).

A substantial number of writers (Kim, [16]; Kim, [17]) from the Dong-A Daily harshly criticised the KTU for its opposition to teacher evaluation and merit-based bonus pay. These articles described the KTU as 'a bigot, frustrating parents' expectation on the merit of the teacher evaluation system to help improve schools' competitiveness' (Kim, [17]). In contrast, the progressive newspaper interpreted the US's teacher evaluation policy in quite a different way. For example, Tae-Sun Kwon (2009) from the Hankyoreh News maintained that

Obama's teacher evaluation system is not the same as South Korea's in that Arne Duncan, the US Secretary of Education, ran the system to consider various indicators assessing teachers' performance beyond students' test scores since he was the superintendent for the Chicago public schools.

She also stated that 'Duncan's evaluation system is used to improve schools rather than punish individual low-ranked teachers so that teachers are more motivated to collaborate'.

In the course of the debate, US President Obama has been frequently quoted. In the spring of 2009, Obama's announcement of his education plan led to considerable media coverage, with particular focus on teacher evaluation, merit pay, and school choice. In the same speech, Obama maintained that the US must learn from South Korean education, particularly in terms of longer school hours and higher student achievement. He stated, 'If they can do that in South Korea, we can do it right here in the United States of America' (Obama, [36]). The conservative newspaper reacted more positively to his impression of the strength of the South Korean educational model. His remarks were appropriated in the Dong-A Daily to recuperate the social legitimacy of competition and to secure justification of competition-based reform proposals in South Korea (e.g. see Hong, [12]; Kim, [16]). The attacks on the teachers' union became more intensified when quoting Obama's speech in the conservative newspaper. In some articles (e.g. Hong, [12]; Kim, [16]), the image of Obama was that he was taking a courageous stance against teachers' unions that constituted an important approach of the US Democratic Party.

Furthermore, Obama's comments on charter schools and school choice have been extensively discussed in South Korean media. An influential Dong-A Daily writer, Sun-Deok Kim ([18]), praised the success of New York City's Harlem Success Academy as a charter school, attributing it to the market-based decentralised system. She linked the success of American charter schools to the Autonomous Public High Schools of South Korea, which were introduced in 2008 as part of the High School 300 Project. Similarly, Lee (2009), in the same paper, also introduced the Equity Project Charter School as a successful public school model in the US, arguing that 'school choice can promote teacher enthusiasm leading to the increase of test scores for low achieving poor students like in the US'. The Dong-A Daily has also been a strong supporter of school choice with elite school options such as special-purpose high schools (e.g. foreign language schools, science high schools, and international high schools) in South Korea.

In contrast, articles from the Hankyoreh News have called for the abolition of special-purpose high schools on the grounds that their existence stimulates fierce competition, being perceived as a sure route to top universities. This newspaper also featured the US's charter schools, but accentuated this with its more communitarian solution for school change. For example, charter schools are introduced as progressive programmes for disadvantaged students, along with local engagement in reviving schools (Kwon, [27]). Later in 2008, when the South Korean government planned the High School 300 Project, an Hankyoreh News editorial (2 October 2008) warned that 'this project leads to segregated education like in the US, placing impoverished public schools at the bottom' and argued further that 'some privileged charter schools in the US are an example'. Magnet schools in the US have also been mentioned in this newspaper, but were not thought of as part of market-based reforms. For example, Koh ([19]), in an op-ed, featured the case of a US magnet school with a focus on educating underprivileged children. Articles have featured the charter school or magnet school not as a competitive school choice model but as a model of progressive schools. Despite these articles' negative attitudes toward school choice, some choice options were deemed to be acceptable so long as they were expected to meet the needs of at-risk students or some other students with special needs, favouring more diverse education.

Despite the stark contrasts in political interpretation between the two newspapers, it is interesting that both newspapers rarely comment on the lower PISA rankings of the US, so the PISA results have not affected the referential status of US education in South Korea. The conservative Dong-A Daily tends to strongly assume that the US is an unquestionable reference point. Some articles in the Hankyoreh News commented on the low achievement of the US students in PISA. But the number of pertinent articles is not substantial enough to make a claim that the low PISA ranking of the US influences the pattern of referencing or rejecting US education reform models in South Korea.

It is argued that evidence-based decision-making has become a global educational phenomenon because international comparative tests continuously provide useful data and results about which country has the best practices and what education policies are really working. As Wiseman ([52]) states, '"what works" is a pseudonym for "best practice"' (p. 2) in the global policy field; the pattern of policy referencing seems to be more likely to depend on purposeful deliberation of evidence, letting us know what works and what is the best. Today, there are reasons to assume that calculative rationality by new global education governance has become more prominent in policy-borrowing discourses.

Although many studies support this assumption, the data in this study can be read as showing that the act of reasoning in the process of policy borrowing is not only inconclusive, but also often conflicting. The politics in the process can be theoretically linked with what Raymond Williams ([51]) calls a 'structure of feeling' which addresses both the forces of structure and of subjectivity. This concept helps in understanding the interplay between the impetus of social structure and individual experiences, including both the conscious and the unconscious. The feelings of human subjects are culturally constituted by material and historical experiences and their changes. The collective experiences of ways of thinking about the US are closely related to the concept of 'compressed modernity' in South Korea (Chang, [4]). This concept is often used by Korean scholars in the social science field. Among them, Chang ([4]) has defined compressed modernity as a civilisational condition in which economic, political, social, and cultural changes occur in an extremely condensed manner within in a short period of time. Thus, policy learning in a given society is nothing but an embodiment of modernity that hardly transcends the boundaries of the cultural and material conditions. In line with this discussion, Kang ([15]) asserts that South Koreans' inclination towards America might not be formed by imperialistic motives, but might be the result of what can be called 'internalized colonialism'. In this experience, 'advanced–underdeveloped' binary oppositions are used. This reminds us of Said's ([41]) concept of a West–Rest binary, signifying the superiority of the West to the rest of the world. These two are related but not the same thing, because the West–Rest binary is not the only way Western people identify themselves, but it is also often used by the people of 'the rest', who look to the West for their new identity (Sung, [44]). Following Fanon's ([8]) psychoanalytic approach to the issues of post-colonialism, Chen ([5]) succinctly points out that many Asian people want to be validated through their recognition by the US:

It would be inappropriate to directly apply Fanon's famous thesis to suggest that Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese want to be American just as 'the black man wants to be white'. However, it is difficult to deny that a similar theoretical logic is at work. (Chen, [5], p. 178)

South Korea has experienced rapid and dramatic modernisation within only one generation, especially in the second half of the 20th century. Today, most South Koreans in their 60s and older have undergone a wide range of developmental stages from an agricultural and Confucian period, through industrialisation, to a post-modern information-based society (Chang, [4]; Kang, [15]). This rapid and condensed modernisation affects the structure of feeling in South Korean minds. The same holds true when it comes to policy-borrowing discourses. The historical experiences constructed through South Korean compressed modernisation explain the continuation of the strong status of the US as a key referencing point. This pattern contributes to the structure of feeling, which is psychologically made up and sociologically influenced by historical and cultural experiences.

Finnish education, which has emerged as an ideal global model, is frequently referenced by the media and discussed in domestic education reform debates in South Korea in the post-PISA era (Takayama et al., [46]). More specifically, educational progressivists view Finland as a role model, often idealise their social democratic welfare system, and regard Finnish education as an alternative system for the future of South Korean education. For instance, Pasi Sahlberg ([40]) is extensively cited by those who oppose the accountability system, in that he formulated Finnish education as the exact opposite of what is being tried in the US. However, the Finnish model has never been translated into actual policies in South Korea. Although the Finnish model has become a powerful source of inspiration, it has not been adopted as an actual policy given the strong trend of borrowing from the accountability system of US education.

Ironically some influential figures (Hirsch, [11]; Ravitch, [37]) in US education argue that there are many lessons to draw from South Korea's success in education. International league tables and competition accelerate this drive because Asian nations have dominated the top places. In the US, the disappointing results of international league tables are used to scandalise the system and legitimise new reform initiatives (Steiner-Khamsi, [43]). Many US scholars and commentators (Bennett, Finn, & Cribb, [3]; Hirsch, [11]; Ravitch, [37]) have tried to legitimate the accountability system by referencing the case of East Asian countries, including South Korea, where rigid national curriculum standards and rigorous tests are thought to be major reasons for their success in international league tables.

The US has borrowed some elements of state curriculum standards and standardised achievement tests from East Asian countries. But then, South Korea re-borrowed those policies in the name of the accountability system, with some additions of market ideas. This is similar to the phenomenon of re-borrowing in linguistics, in that re-borrowing is the process in which a word is originally borrowed from one language to another and then re-borrowed to the original language in a somewhat different meaning. This questions the hypothesis of lesson-drawing from best practices in the global education policy field. Instead, it is more likely to imply that policy actors use external references to US education in order to legitimise their own preferred policy and system.

The OECD, through PISA, has become central to 'global empiricism' (Torrance, [47]). It has also created an atmosphere of evidence-based policymaking (Wiseman, [52]). The OECD is often assumed to play the new institutional role of inducing changes in domestic educational practices as a result of an emerging global educational governance system (Meyer & Benavot, [35]). This unprecedented effect of PISA is thought to dominate global educational discourses, and, as a consequence, to lead to global educational convergence. Regardless of the positive or negative assessment of the emergent roles of the OECD and PISA, most discussions seem to assume that the release of international comparison results has the potential to lead to the convergence of domestic educational reforms, policies, and practices based on what works, best practices, or international benchmarks at the global level (Wiseman, [52]).

This paper seeks to contribute to recent comparative discussions about the replacement of traditional referential points as a result of the new global governance by the OECD through PISA. Having this in mind, we have interrogated whether the lower PISA rankings of the US have resulted in the shifting of its referential status in South Korea. The research question was motivated by the fact that the Asian case, as another part of the globe, has largely been left unrecognised in such discussions. In this research, media representation of the US was analysed using two disparate newspapers at two time periods (three years before 2000 and another three years after 2009) as a proxy of the pre-PISA vs. post-PISA era. Recently, the global governance by comparative data has become more resonant elsewhere; however, the results of this study suggest that one should be careful about oversimplification.

Although international league tables and new knowledge about 'best practices', such as the Finnish success story, have shifted the pattern of referencing in South Korea too, the status of the US as a reference point has been little changed. Evidence-based reasoning has little to do with the shift of referencing patterns when it comes to the US in South Korea. In other words, the status of the US as a benchmark or reform model remains unchanged. Despite the US's mediocre standings in PISA's league tables and other negative images, such as high drop-out rates, historical and cultural experiences, and post-war political, economic, and military influence, the US remains a crucial reference point in South Korean habits of mind.

The pattern has something to do with political ideology, and the strong status of US education as a reference point is more prominent in the conservative media representation. The Dong-A Daily has been committed to disseminating a package of neoliberal reforms, such as a test-based accountability system, teacher evaluation, merit pay, and school choice. In the process, US education is often referred to as a role model and a source of legitimacy. On the contrary, the Hankyoreh News has rejected most of these policies, claiming that they are either still controversial or have already failed in the US. This newspaper also questioned the conservative media's effort to positively present US education regarding NCLB, charter schools, and Obama's presidential speech on the accountability system. However, it should be noted that even in Hankyoreh News articles, US education is considered very important as a source of drawing lessons from good examples or learning opportunities from bad ones.

As a result of this study, we suggest that the pattern of external referencing in media representation hinges on historical, political, and cultural experiences rather than purely evidence-based discourses, at least in the case of South Korea. We also suggest that the discourses in this process are essentially cultural instead of being based on calculative reasoning. The analysis in this paper demonstrates that policy-referencing discourses can be understood as social and historical practices for establishing legitimacy in order to gain broad social consent. From the two selected newspapers in this study, policy-borrowing practices in South Korea can be better explained within the framework of historical and cultural experiences. Discourses on policy borrowing and referencing have been formed by South Koreans' collective experiences over a long historical period. This cultural explanation can imply much about why the US is not losing its referential status, even in the age of global comparison-seeking evidence-based best practices.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Youl-Kwan Sung is a professor of education at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, South Korea. His research interests include comparative approaches to neoliberal education reform, the politics of national curriculum decision-making, and social justice education.

Yoonmi Lee is a professor of education at Hongik University, Seoul, Korea. She received her PhD from the Department of Educational Policy Studies (majoring in comparative history of education), University of Wisconsin-Madison. She served as President of the Korean Association for History of Education from 2011 to 2012. Her research interests include comparative and transnational history of modern education, education and state formation, and cultural politics of education, particularly in the East Asian context.