Abstract
Governance reform is now a controversial issue in many fields, and with this concern transformation from a traditional to a new type of governance is urged. While the traditional type of governance emphasizes the role of government in steering society, the new one requires the roles not only of government but also of many participants from the private sector, such as for-profit organizations, non-profit organizations, and citizens themselves at the local level. In the field of education, we can find a similar trend. It is still important to re-examine the relation between the central government and local governments, or between educational administration and general administration. However, along with the controversies over these governmental issues, new models of governance have been proposed. These include the choice-market and local partnership models. Even in these new models which emphasize the role of the market or a partnership of the public and the private sectors, however, there exists a need for some governmental mechanism for guaranteeing the quality of educational service, as long as we cannot fully trust the self-adjustment functions of the market or of partnership. A proclaimed policy means is to convert governmental regulation from an input-process level to an output level. While deregulation at the input-process level would enable more private actors to participate in providing public services and to compete with each other more freely, regulation at the output level would guarantee the quality of public services by an assessment of their performance. In the United States of America and England, in addition to severe assessment at the output level, common standards at the national or state levels are set up with the viewpoint of securing national unity or of raising the economic competitive power of the state, as well as of guaranteeing equal educational opportunity to all children. Under this standards/assessment regime, the free activities of many different actors might change into a rather uniform competition aiming toward the same results. Some people have proposed the formation of many different identities through the market mechanism, while others have put forth the creation of a new public sphere through the partnership of many different actors. These proposals are fascinating, but they have ambivalent aspects, as well. On the one hand, these ideas will probably be strongly regulated by the control of standards/assessment by administration. On the other hand, if they are fully realized, they would likely undermine the present principles of public education, such as equality or commonality, thus demanding a restructuring of the idea of public education itself.
