Abstract
Since the 2000s, Japan’s educational administration has experienced more changes than ever before. The Japanese administration itself has been in the process of strengthening the powers of its cabinet functions. With these changes, “the core executives”—the Prime Minister at the national level and governors and mayors at the local level—have gained much more power over educational policies, while the so-called educational policy community, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) and educators, has been losing its influence in recent years. As a result of these changes, the core executives have come to heavily influence the educational policies at the national level, compared to those up until the 1990s. At the local level, as the governal or mayoral educational reforms progressed, the Local Educational Administration Act was reformed in 2014 to decrease the authority of the Boards of Education and strengthen the authority of the Chief Executives (governors and mayors).
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Notes
- 1.
Some examples of English literature on Japanese educational polices are the following: Pempel (1978) analyzed the 1970’s higher education in Japan; Schoppa (1991) examined the educational policies of Japan between the 1970s to the 1980s; Hood (2001) studied the reforms conducted by Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone in the 1980s; and in recent years, Nitta (2008) has analyzed and compared Japan’s and United States’ educational reforms between the 1990s and the early 2000s.
- 2.
- 3.
Basic Act on Education (Act number 120 of 2006), Article2 (5), cited from the ministry of education website (an unofficial translation) (http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/kihon/data/07080117.htm) (2016.3.1).
- 4.
Originally, 700 billion yen was to be allocated to this program using the increased revenue obtained from the consumption tax, which was to be increased from 8% to 10%. However, the Abe administration decided to postpone the raising of the tax that had been planned for April 2015; consequently, the amount allocated for this program was reduced to 500 billion yen.
- 5.
On one hand, there are opinions that by changing the Board of Education to an appointment-based system from an election-based system, the conservative party and the Ministry of Education turned the Boards of Education into a mere façade (Mikami 2013); on the other hand, some praised the continuance of the system of the Board of Education, while other strong voices called for it to be abolished altogether (Honda 2003).
- 6.
The current author also participated as a member in the Educational System Subcommittee discussion.
- 7.
“Mainichi Shimbun,” Morning Edition, December 14, 2013.
- 8.
In the system prior to 2014, the Superintendent was to be appointed by the Board of Education. But in Japan, the Superintendent was also a member of the Board of Education, and it was a rather complicated system. In all practicality, it was customary that when a candidate for the Superintendent was going to be appointed as a member of the Board of Education, the Chief Executive would indicate this to the council before the approval was granted.
- 9.
While the reform on which the ruling party came to an agreement may look like it came about rather abruptly, the ways in which the Superintendent and the Head of the Board of Education were to be consolidated as one, how the Chief Executives were to create the charter, how the Superintendents were to be directly appointed by the Chief Executives, and the shortening of the Superintendents’ terms were all actually points that were discussed within the Central Council for Education. However, when it came to the creation of the General Education Conference, the Central Council for Education hardly discussed the matter, and they are likely ideas that arose from within the leading party discussions.
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Acknowledgment
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 16K04536, 70242469, 20177140, and 26245075.
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Murakami, Y. (2019). National and Local Educational Administration. In: Kitamura, Y., Omomo, T., Katsuno, M. (eds) Education in Japan. Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects, vol 47. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2632-5_5
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