A Study on "Silent Members" in School Management Committee : How the Micro-social Relationships Affect School Governance?

Abstract

Though recent educational reforms have led to decentralised school management and parental participation in school administration, the basis of these reforms is thought to be vulnerable. In particular, some researchers express concerns about the relative inferiority of parents. Sociologists in the United Kingdom indicated the marginalization of parent governors by governors from other categories such as co-opted governors from industry or local governors (Vincent 1996; Deem et al. 1995). Thus, this paper aims to clarify the following two issues in Japanese context; (i) to affirm the existence of inactiveness of parents in School Management Committee's discussion and (ii) the reason of parental inactiveness. To approach these issues, I use a case study method in a specific school, which has a School Management Committee (shorten as SMC). I use the following three data sources; the minutes of SMC, interview transcripts, and field notes of the transaction in SMC. There were three main findings from my analysis, (i) There are so-called "silent members" in the formal discussion within SMC, who rarely, if ever contribute to the transaction, and they are unevenly concentrated in parent category. (ii) These "silent members" felt the restrictive condition which has resulted from following two points; 1) Local power relations affect the atmosphere of SMC discussion. 2) Parent members felt the difficulty to represent the large diversity of parents' views to education. (iii) However, across the years, the difference of activity between categories has been maintained and reproduced by the following two points; 3) Local residents become good advisers for the head teacher so that the agenda of SMC come to be preset between the head teacher and local residents, excluding parent members. 4) Local residents also become enthusiastic school supporters. In contrast, parent members are relatively busy because of everyday child rearing, their own job and regular PTA tasks so that the attitude of parents is seen somewhat "unsupportive". As a result, preferential value-adding to locals silenced parent members. As a proposition, I assert that the position of parents among the actors in governing schools reflect the micro social relationship within the school community.