2024 Volume 91 Issue 2 Pages 248-260
The purpose of this paper is to clarify the changes that Japan's postwar teacher hiring system has undergone through the formation process of the “acceleration and multi-lining” policy of teacher recruitment examinations from the 1960s to the 2020s.
Previous studies dealing with policy trends regarding the “timing” of teacher recruitment have commonly had a strong contemporaneous interest, with issues including a failure to examine policy trends before the late 1970s and surrounding the 2022 report of the Central Education Council. This paper addresses these limitations with an analysis covering the 1960s, when a policy interest in “timing” can be found, up to the 2020s.
This analysis examines how the issue of the “timing” of teacher recruitment exams has been treated in the education policy process at the central government level. The paper examines documents and meeting minutes from the Ministry of Education, boards of education, education-related councils and conferences, and newspaper articles.
The analysis reveals the following three points.
First, there were two different policy interests regarding the “timing” of teacher recruitment examinations: preventing the outflow of personnel to other municipalities and preventing the outflow of personnel to other jobs. From the mid-1960s on, regional unification of examination dates initially emerged as a measure to prevent personnel outflow to other municipalities; in the late 1970s, it was also called for as a preparation for earlier hiring decisions in order to prevent personnel outflow to other jobs.
Second, against the backdrop of the nationwide spread of regional unification, the saturation of accelerated recruitment schedules, and increasingly competitive hiring, the Ministry's policy interest in “timing” receded during the late 1990s and 2000s. The unification of examination dates among local governments was relaxed or even dispersed. However, policy interest in “timing” emerged again after the mid-2010s; in the 2020s, “acceleration of examination dates” and “multi-lining examination routes” appeared as measures to prevent the outflow of personnel to other jobs. Local governments actively promoted “multiple examination routes,” resulting in an increase in the number of examination routes with different dates in neighboring areas.
Third, the policy formulated in 2023 combines the acceleration of examination dates and multi-lining examination routes with the idea of creating common examinations. Thus, the policy idea of creating common examinations, which has been present since the mid-2010s, is being prepared for implementation by using the policy ideas of acceleration and multi-lining as resources.
Finally, the paper argues that these policy trends can be viewed as a process of the structural transformation of teacher hiring in postwar Japan from the regional (wide area) level to the national and local (area) levels, and as a growing influence of national actors.
