How do teacher evaluation practices affect school leadership in Japan?

抄録

In Japan, as elsewhere in the world, school leadership is increasingly difficult to enact because of the escalating demanding directives that are imposed on schools. As such, the government has been pro-viding head teachers with various resources to help them perform their leadership responsibilities. Teacher evaluation is a case in point. Thus, by utilising quantitative data from a national survey and qualitative data from interviews with head teachers and teachers, this article describes the reorienta-tion of school leadership, with a particular focus on the role of a new teacher evaluation system in this process. The new teacher evaluation system offers better facilitation and empowerment for head teachers to recognise and reward teachers’ efforts, including convincing sceptical teachers, and even enforcing recalcitrant teachers into working towards organisational goals. However, the power the new teacher evaluation system grants to head teachers does pose some problems as well. Teachers are increasingly placed in disadvantaged positions vis-à-vis head teachers. Therefore, the need to improve teacher evaluation practices for the purpose of empowering teachers as well as head teachers is ad-dressed in this article.