Korean Education Development Institute

Kim Mooyoung | Korea Education Development Institute I am a researcher at the Korea Education Development Institute (KEDI). My core interest is a simple question: can an education system learn? Not just adapt under pressure, but learn from its own failures, revise its assumptions, and improve — continuously, structurally, and democratically. Recent Research: Toward a Learning Educational System My most recent work, “Is a Learning Educational System Possible? An Exploratory Case Study on Research–Practice Partnerships” (2025), takes this question seriously as both a theoretical and practical problem. Drawing on policy learning theory — I developed a conceptual framework identifying four necessary conditions for a learning educational system: systems thinking, a democratic public sphere, scientific evidence, and stable funding and organizational infrastructure. These are not independent variables but form a hierarchical, recursive structure: systems thinking shapes what questions get asked; democratic deliberation determines whose problems get defined; scientific evidence converts those deliberations into institutional memory; and stable organizations sustain all three over time. To test this framework against practice, I conducted an exploratory case study of two American Research–Practice Partnerships (RPPs) — in San Francisco (SFUSD–Stanford) and Madison (MMSD–University of Wisconsin). RPPs are long-term, intentional collaborations between researchers and practitioners that jointly define local educational problems and continuously design and evaluate improvement strategies. They represent one of the most promising institutional models for embedding improvement science into a regional education system. The findings are instructive. Both partnerships produce scientific evidence — San Francisco’s portfolio of 83 studies includes 16 quasi-experimental designs (RCTs, regression discontinuity, difference-in-differences), reflecting a rigorous commitment to causal inference. Research agendas move beyond individual classrooms to engage family, community, and district-level levers — a hallmark of systems thinking in practice. But both partnerships also reveal significant gaps: the democratic public sphere is under-realized, with agendas driven primarily by district leadership or external funders rather than by students, parents, or community members; and funding stability remains precarious, as Madison’s grant program has since ended, with decline in research output. The study concludes by examining what it would take to introduce RPPs in the Korean context — and where the structural conditions are weakest. Korea’s high rates of private tutoring expenditure, increasing numbers of students falling below basic proficiency levels, and persistent youth mental health challenges suggest that existing policy cycles are not generating double-loop learning. I argue that the country needs cross-ministerial partnerships (bridging education, technology, and local government), mega-regional RPP structures, and publicly funded brokering organizations to make improvement research sustainable at scale. Areas of Expertise My work sits at the intersection of several domains. In improvement science and research methodology, I engage with Bryk’s improvement science and PDSA-based approaches, asking how these can be adapted for national policy contexts rather than individual schools or networks. I am interested in the epistemological difference between asking “what works?” and “what works, for whom, under what conditions?” — and what that shift demands from researchers, policymakers, and practitioners alike. In education policy and systems thinking, policy learning can be institutionalized rather than left to the goodwill of individual officials. In equity and improvement, I am attentive to questions of democratic legitimacy in research agenda-setting. Who defines the problem? Whose experience counts as evidence? The shift from researcher-driven, top-down problem definition to co-constructed, bottom-up inquiry is not merely methodological — it is political. RPPs that fail to grapple with power dynamics in agenda-setting risk reproducing the same inequities they claim to address. Field-Building Work Beyond my own research, I am actively working to introduce RPP as a concept and institutional model to Korean education policy audiences — translating and synthesizing an international literature that has not yet been systematically engaged in Korea. This includes examining adaptation cases from Norway, Sweden, Israel, and Switzerland, and building the policy argument for why Korea’s existing infrastructure (three decades of local education autonomy, a growing evidence-based policy movement, and significant university-district data assets) makes RPP feasible in ways that may not have been true a decade ago. I believe the most urgent field-building work is not technical but epistemic: helping policymakers and education leaders develop tolerance for the kind of transparent, institutionalized failure analysis that learning educational systems require. As the political science literature on blame avoidance reminds us, systems that cannot publicly acknowledge failure cannot learn from it. Building the cultural and institutional conditions for Korea is the work I am most committed to. I am eager to connect with ISN members working on RPPs, networked improvement communities, practical measurement, and the policy conditions that enable or constrain improvement at scale. I am especially interested in cross-national comparisons and in members exploring how improvement science travels across different governance structures and political cultures. Contact: nonzerokim@gmail.com