Many of the studies of school choice in America published in Japanese have been based on documents written by American researchers. This situation imposes a critical limitation on the examination of the implications inherent in the system of school choice for the educational change that Japan is facing. Bearing in mind the differences between Japanese and American systems regarding school choice, this paper sets out to discover the facts and mechanisms of the open enrollment program of a city district in California.
Because there is no official registration system like the Japanese Jyumin-toroku or catchment areas rigidly delineated by city councils(chonai), American children are not assumed to be the prospective students of individual schools. For this reason parents are expected to enroll their children as students in the public school system just before they reach school age. Ordinarily, they are allotted places in their local schools according to where they live. Open enrollment is a system whereby parents are able to request enrollment at any school in the district regardless of where they live, although the availability of spaces, sibling preferences, and the ethnic balance of the school must all be taken into account.
Through the open enrollment program that was introduced in the early 1990s, some schools are losing and others are gaining many students. In order to reveal the internal mechanisms of this program this paper focuses on two middle schools:the most popular and the least popular.
These two middle schools are very different from each other in such aspects as academic achievement and personal safety. The least popular school is in a suburban area, but it has been notorious for its lack of safety and low level of academic achievement. By contrast, the most popular school is an inner-city middle school situated on the periphery of the downtown and close to a residential area. The neighborhood environment of the most popular school is far better than that of the least popular one. In addition, in the 1980s the most popular school established an academic program titled Gifted and Talented Education(GATE). The school channels students with special academic interests into this GATE program so as to adjust educational settings to student diversity.
Through the open enrollment program, the most popular school has become a favorite among parents who live within the catchment areas of the least and the second least popular schools. The parents living within the catchment area of the least popular school refuse to send their children to that school, citing its unsafe environment as an unattractive feature, and seek places for them instead in the most popular school, to which they are mainly attracted by the GATE program.
Interestingly, no competition among parents for specific middle schools is attributable to open enrollment. This is partly because the student numbers of the most popular school are falling. For that reason the school is able to offer a great number of places to open enrollment and attract academically gifted students from throughout the district. Moreover, many parents seem to be unaware of the existence of the program. This may also contribute to the lack of competition. Unless parents try to obtain information about open enrollment by themselves, they may never find out about the existence of the program. Access to successful open enrollment is limited to those who are actively seeking information about education and who can provide transportation for their children to and from school.
By using the open enrollment program, parents are easily able to avoid local schools in unsafe areas and send their children to the most popular school that has the GATE program. The open enrollment program offers a district-wide multiple tracking system rather than a single-track system of schooling, mainly for the parents and the children seeking the elite track at the middle school level.

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The purpose of this paper is to consider the problem of deregulation in public education for language minority students in California by focusing on what is called results-oriented accountability.
The education of language minorities is a very controversial topic in the United States, especially in California, because so many people have immigrated into the United States in this state from all over the world. The number of LEP (Limited English Proficiency) students has increased rapidly along with the wide range of languages they have brought with them. Another reason why the education for language minorities, especially bilingual education, has been controversial is the context of the conflict between English-Only and English-Plus. English-Only means the opinions and movements supporting the unification of the nation state of the United States through the common language of English. English-Plus, on the other hand, means those opinions and movements to make the United States a multilingual society by preserving minority languages. As the public school is the most important system for a democratic American society, the decision of the language to be used as the media for learning (or to be taught in) reflects the conflict between English-Only and English-Plus. It is thus very important, even essential, to consider the problem of education for language minorities (LEP) in, the United States.
In California, the Bilingual Bicultural Education Act of 1976 was abolished in 1987. By the abolition of the Act of 1976, the regulations of bilingual programs and the assignment of bilingual teachers were deregulated and the discretionary power of the school districts was extended. This meant that local school districts were given the responsibility to overcome English language barriers confronting LEP students and to develop their academic achievement as well. This change was accompanied by the transformation of accountability to school districts. Though the Act of 1976 required school districts to implement bilingual programs and assign bilingual teachers, they were required to show the results of their programs for LEP after the abolition. The nature of accountability for school districts was thus transformed from process-oriented to result-oriented. Result-oriented accountability, which includes, for example, performance accountability and program accountability, has to clear the objectives of policy in the evaluation of the results of the program. Therefore this change of the educational accountability for language minorities by deregulation has emphasized English as an objective to educate language minorities.
The expansion of the discretionary power of school districts with resultsoriented accountability also influenced the reform of teacher credentialing for LEP students. As it was not necessary for the school districts to implement bilingual programs or to assign bilingual teachers, the demand for teachers who were English speakers increased. In order to increase the supply of teachers who were English speakers the LEP teacher's certificate system was reformed. The expansion of the discretionary power of the school districts and the reform of the LEP teacher's certificate system brought about an increase of educational opportunities in English for anguage minorities.
The findings of this study are as follows: First, by deregulation of the implementation of bilingual programs local school districts had a limited responsibility to develop English abilities and academic achievement. This did not necessarily include teacher training and assignments. Furthermore, there was the possibility that local school districts were not willing to meet various and individual needs because of the increase of English-speaking LEP teachers resulting from the reform of the LEP teacher's certificate system.

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This is a paper attempting to analyze and interpret the process of the formation of American views of Japanese education and the distribution of these views among American citizens from the 1860s through the 1870s.There are a number of publications which have reported research on Americans'observations of Japan's education in the 1860s.Most of them have tried to understand Japanese education through American perspectives, but it is also necessary for Japanese researchers to turn around the focus by inquiring into the meanings of this information about Japan's education for Americans themselves.It should be recognized that information about Japan's education was used not only with regard to Japanese people but also by Americans for their own sake.The underlying assumption of this paper is that information regarding Japanese education was used for inspiring reform of the American public school system.To examine this assumption, I collected and analyzed materials concerning Japanese education which were published and distributed among American educators and administrators in this period.These materials include:
(1) Publications of the United States Bureau of Education: Report of Commissioner of Education, Circulars of Information of the Bureau of Education, and the International Conference on Education (Philadelphia).
(2) Official records of the Addresses and Proceedings of National Education Association (N.E.A.): The Addresses and Journal of Proceedings of the N.E.A.
(3) Educational journals: American Journal of Education, American Educational Monthly, The National Teacher, The Ohio Educational Monthly, The Pennsylvania School Journal, The New York School Journal, New-England Journal of Education.
First of all, I counted the number of publications and characterized the annual tendency of the content area of each article. Through this analysis, I discovered that American educators were interested in Japan's education much more than we had previously thought. The United States Bureau of Education was very active in collecting information on education in Japan.The educational journals were also a major channel for transmitting information on Japan's education to the United States.
Secondly, I searched for information sources with individual articles concerning Japan's education and traced the process of the transmission of information. Consequently, I found two important historical facts:First, there are two major information sources, i.e., official information which originated from the Ministry of Education and information sent by foreigners employed by the Japanese government. Second, the United States Bureau of Education is the major recepient of the information. Third, John Eaton, a Commissioner of the Bureau of Education, played a key role in collecting and distributing information about Japan's education.He built a broad channel for information exchange with Fujimaro Tanaka, Vice Minister of the Department of Education in Japan.This channel facilitated the transformation of information for both countries in two ways. His private letters to David Murray, a Superintendent of the Department of Education, indicates Eaton's unusual concern with education in Japan.It also shows that he had the intention to use information about Japan's education for formulating American educational policies. Those facts provides us with a potential interpretation of Eaton's intention that he had a desire to strengthen federal power in educational policy-making.Information processing was an important strategy for this purpose.

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The purpose of this paper is to investigate effects of the market mechanism on the structural changes in the British higher education system, focusing on the differentiation of positions and functions between Pre-1992Universities and Former Polytechnic Universities.
From the late 1980s there was a rapid expansion of higher education in Britain.Age participation rates in higher education approximately doubled during a period of less than ten years.This expansion meant a structural change from an elite into a mass system.In this “massification” process, the British government transformed its higher education system into a unitary system from a binary one under the Further and Higher Education Act 1992. In this Act, many of the public sector higher education institutions (mainly Polytechnics) were given university status. As a result of these reforms, about half of the universities we see today were upgraded from Polytechnics after 1992. Today, the unified university sector is comprised of institutions that originally had different histories and missions.

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In this article I will try to clarify the logic of the Amendment of the Compulsory Education Act of 1998. In this year an Act to reinforce the control of compulsory education was adopted unanimously in the Parliament. By this act, control of compulsory education in a family setting was reinforced. In France freedom of education has been respected since the formation of the national education system. Why should compulsory education be reinforced in a country which emphasizes freedom of education? This is the fundamental problem to clarify in this article.

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It has long been debated in India that a nation's education depends for its excellence on the quality of its teachers. The purpose of this paper is to study and consider the quality of primary teacher training at the District Institutes of Education and Training (DIETs) in Delhi and Haryana. The discussion in this paper is based on the results of a questionnaire administered by the author in 1998-1999 to successful recent students at DIETS in Motibagh, Delhi, and Gurgaon, Haryana; interviews with Government officials and educators responsible for school education; and published reports of the Government of India.

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This paper describes the actual ‘on-the-ground’ situations of local implementation of primary-educational policies in the Republic of Tanzania, with special reference to the management of primary schools, pupil's class attendance, and local inhabitants' participation in primary education.

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