Abstract
This paper focuses on public schools with a unified lower and upper secondary school program and empirically reveals –the reason why these schools were introduced and then expanded. This paper employs both an event history analysis and multi-level analysis. According to the empirical results, for selection schools, the size of teachers’ unions has negative impacts to introduce new schools. And for alignment schools, the number of selection schools has negative ones. Empirical analysis also finds out that the expansion of selection schools has been related with the rate of private schools, students’ outmigration to other prefectures, and financial capacities of the local governments. On the other hand, alignment schools are located in prefectures where financial capacity of its local government is fairly limited. In conclusion, this paper suggests that there exists substantial inequality in secondary school education if public school with unified secondary school program continues to grow.
