Teachers still don't feel protected despite landmark reforms, forum finds

Despite amendments to five laws aimed at protecting teachers' rights, educators on the ground still report little improvement in how well their classroom activities are safeguarded, a forum heard Thursday. Experts said the burden of parent complaints and child abuse allegations is discouraging teachers from disciplining students, and called for schools and district offices — not individual teachers — to bear greater institutional responsibility.

The National Education Commission and the Korea Educational Development Institute jointly hosted the forum Thursday at the Korea Press Center in Jung-gu, Seoul, under the theme of strengthening protections for teachers' educational activities. About 100 participants attended, including teachers, parents and education experts.

In her opening remarks, National Education Commission Chairperson Cha Jeong-in said education becomes impossible when legitimate teaching activities go unprotected. "When a teacher faces criminal charges simply for disciplining a disruptive student, and even reasonable guidance is chilled as a result, every child ultimately suffers," she said.

She added that establishing teachers' authority is a matter of basic order, and that the state must take responsibility for building it through institutional frameworks and legal authority.

Yoo Kyung-hun, head of the Korea Educational Development Institute's primary and secondary education research division, said the five-law amendments had strengthened the legal foundation and support systems, but that official statistics alone fail to capture how teachers actually feel on the ground. The Educational Activity Protection Committee convened 2,189 times in the first half of 2025 alone, and 92.7 percent of the 4,234 cases reviewed for infringement of educational activities in the 2024 school year were found to constitute actual infringement.

A survey of teachers found that 42.6 percent said they had still experienced infringement of their educational activities since the legal amendments. Among those who reported such experiences, 75.5 percent said interference by parents had not decreased, while 79 percent said interference by students had not decreased either. The support teachers said they needed most included legal consulting, free litigation counseling and stronger penalties for retaliatory false child abuse reports.

Jang Deok-ho, a professor at Konkuk University, said restoring teachers' authority requires addressing not only legal and institutional reforms but also the structural problems weighing on schools — including school violence cases, child abuse reports and administrative burdens. "In schools, the emotional abuse provision of the Child Welfare Act is so burdensome that teachers call it the 'hurt feelings law' or the 'grim reaper law,'" Jang said. "Despite efforts to revise laws and reform systems, teachers still don't feel the difference on the ground."

Jang also criticized the current framework for handling school violence. "What remains in schools — spaces where educational guidance should take place — is nothing but judicial procedure," he said. "A system that is neither education nor justice has taken root in our schools."

The forum recommended shifting responsibility for handling complaints away from individual teachers and onto institutional bodies such as schools and district education support offices. Participants also called for support systems that reduce teacher anxiety and self-censorship before disputes escalate into formal cases. In addition, the forum urged expanding specialist staffing to address the complex needs of students with borderline intellectual functioning, ADHD and emotional or behavioral crises, and called for a stronger role for school administrators.

The National Education Commission and the Korea Educational Development Institute said they plan to use Thursday's discussions as the basis for developing medium- and long-term policy alternatives aimed at protecting teachers' educational activities and rebuilding trust within school communities.