Many Japanese government officials believe that new ideas and knowledge have exerted a great influence on policy making seen in this country from the latter half of the 1990s. Moreover, political scientists in Japan have recently given great attention to the importance of ideas and knowledge in the policymaking process. In this paper I analyze the process of educational policymaking with a special focus on the roles and importance of ideas and knowledge. In 1996 the OECD insisted that the societies of developed countries would become knowledge-based in the future. Knowledge is in fact now of crucial importance for economic growth and prosperity. The government thus came to think of universities as the nucleus of a national system of innovation, pressuring schools to promote children's competencies at a higher level. The idea of a knowledge-based, knowledge-creating society therefore exerted great influence on the policymaking process during the incorporation of National Universities (1996-2003) and revision of the Course of Study (1999-2008). During this process, new ideas and knowledge were influenced by the principles of education (autonomy of the university, specialties concerning curriculum, etc.), the opinions of industry and others, and were clearly designed to protect these principles. My analysis of these trends reached the following conclusions : (1) In the policymaking process, the Ministry of Education must create a persuasive new idea and then cooperate with the various actors concerned in order to reach agreement on the idea, especially when it comes to making compromises that may be needed between different ministries, the Prime Minister's Office, other branches of government, and the public. (2) The idea offered needs to provide a common basis for discussion among actors from different standpoints, for example for those from the educational world, the industrial world, and so on. (3) Reflections needed to produce the idea can be seen as expanding the range of possibilities for the executive branch to appropriately respond to a changing, fluid situation. Potential problems in the future are then pointed out through a discussion of two key points : (1) Hereafter, the Ministry of Education and the researcher should clarify the idea proposed and its intentions. Some researchers have criticized school education reforms based on the idea of a knowledge-based society. (2) The ability of the Ministry of Education to produce new ideas and new knowledge is in fact actually rather weak. New ideas and knowledge can be seen as increasingly important in terms of policymaking. An improvement is now called for in the Ministry's ability to discover and propose new ideas and new knowledge.

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Compared to the diversity of local governance in the United States, Japanese local governments are formed in terms of a single governance style in spite of the varieties of their size. The local governance model in Japan is of the "strong mayor - council" type, which is adopted by most of U.S. big cities. Another type of governance, that of "city manager - council", is a product of municipality reform which occurred in the late 19th or early 20th century and which is very close to the governance of school districts. Most school board members who are representatives based on non-partisan elections have appointed a superintendent as a professional education manager and administrator of their district's office. Education policy communities were then formed, and they prevented professional education staff from being put under political pressure while they also maintained a monopoly on the educational decision-making process. Recently, big city mayors in the U.S. have been paying more attention to education. Some of them are successfully given the authority to appoint school boards members by state-level governments. Such school districts taken over by city mayors resemble Japanese boards of education. Though recent arguments about the reorganization of the system of local boards of education in Japan, which have been derived from the decentralization movement beginning in the early 2000s, argue for the abolishment of local boards of education, that discussion has in fact shifted toward the rearrangement of powers between mayors and boards of education. However, the new national testing in Japan may become a trigger for controversy surrounding this matter, that is, of the mayoral control of education. Because of the emergence of mayors and governors who say that the test scores of each city or school should be opened to the public, we can see a serious antagonism growing between mayors and governors on the one hand and boards of education which have been apprehensive about bringing competitiveness into public education and the mayoral control of education on the other. Considerable research on the mayoral takeover of U.S. urban education boards and state assessment and testing policies after passage of the No Child Left Behind Act provides us with some possible implications of these changes. Although we hardly need state the importance of the political neutrality of public education, we should consider that a successful and continual education reform movement needs the mobilization of citizens, including various actors such as council members and business, union, and community leaders. Big cities in both America and Japan which have adopted the "strong mayor-council" style of governance, in this case with the mayor as a political leader, can thus play the role of arranging the various actors of the community in order to improve public education.

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This paper aims to clarify the significance of the viewpoint of "school consolidation is political phenomenon" as the framework for policy decision on the allocation planning of public schools. Long-range declining birth rate and aging in Japan have been continuing even today as important background of increasing incidence of school consolidation of elementary and junior high schools. But the whole map of school consolidation in Japan has not been clear until now for the lack of nation-wide survey on the topic. Firstly, we intend to clarify the whole map of recent trends of school consolidation and consciousness of superintendent of schools and boards of education in each municipalities on the topics by using 3 times nationwide survey on school consolidation of elementary and junior high schools executed in 2006 and 2008. Secondarily, by focusing on the problem of proper size of school the consciousness of superintendents of schools on it and reallocation planning of schools in each municipalities and so on have been clarified for understanding political context of educational decision of superintendents of schools. Thirdly, by picking up optimization and satisfying approach as the framework of efficient and rational organizational behavior by H. Simon, the possibility of satisfying approach as framework for policy decision on allocation planning of schools has been discussed and the significance of political framework for solving school consolidation or school allocation planning has been pointed out.

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The micro-political perspective of schools differentiates itself from non-political perspectives in that it focuses on a diversity of purposes in school organizations whereas social systems theory focuses on a consensus among members of school organizations. It also differentiates itself from macro-political perspectives in that it recognizes conflict in schools not as a reproduction of ideological and/or interest conflict in society but as an original process in each school. There are two factors in the development of the micro-politics perspective around 1990, the theoretical and the empirical. The former is a radical change of the view on power by Foucault, and on school organization by loose coupling theory and new institutional theory. The latter is education reform based on neo-liberalism that emphasizes the neutrality of markets and management techniques in business. From the micro-political perspective a pattern of power relations has emerged as a result of the interaction of the members of an organization. As places of micro-politics in schools I examined classrooms, staffrooms, and infirmaries in Japanese schools. In classrooms students anticipate teachers' educational intentions. Some students try to meet the anticipated intentions and others refuse or ignore it, while teachers at the same time try to control students' reactions to these educational intentions. There are also identity politics related to ethnicity, sex, handicap, and so on. Students struggle to adapt to the class, enhancing their own self-esteem. Teachers try to treat students equally and yet treat some students differently according to their specific characteristics at the same time. Staffrooms are places where teachers do their jobs, take a rest, see visitors, hold meetings and so on. They are political places because their functions are not restricted and various activities meet and mix there. There are both connecting and dividing forces in staffrooms. Teachers are connected in one respect, acting in likely ways in the face of others. They are divided in another respect according to their subject or grade. Infirmaries are place where priority is given not to performance but to health, and some deviations from rules in classrooms are permitted there. Conflicts may thus occur between classroom teachers and school nurses. Not suprisingly, school nurses recently have identity problems because their roles have been broadened. School organizationa are thus a crossroads of places of micro-politics, and school management is a self-referential activity of micro-politics to control the micro-politics that occur in schools. Although conflicts in school organizations cannot always be resolved, organizational order is formed through an emergence of consensus from interaction and formal decision-making. Moreover, recently the environment of school management is so complex that micro-politics can neither be oppressed nor concealed. It is important to empower teachers and motivate them to collaborate. From such a point of view, the recent reform of school management through school evaluation and teacher appraisal may have negative effects on teacher empowerment and organizational capacity building in schools. Finally, the connection of politics inside and outside of schools is discussed. Until recently it was recognized as the interaction of macro-politics and micro-politics. But it can also be recognized as the interaction of micro-politics inside and outside of schools. An analysis of this interaction may elucidate the new realities of educational administration.

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Nowadays in Japanese schools, including nursery schools, kindergartens, elementary schools, lower secondary schools and upper secondary schools, keeping a good relationship between teachers and parents has become more difficult. The advance of the information society and changes in social structures have been causes of stress for many people. At the same time, from the latter half of the 1990s the Neoliberal political movement has been promoted in the society and educational system. The result of the latter movement has been "structural reform," usually as seen as the weak becoming the victim of the strong. As the society has experienced greater and greater economic inequality, the tendency to turn one's own irritations and frustrations upon the other has become worse. In many industrial fields the demand for an improvement in the quality and content of services has been increasing, and such demands can now be seen for schools and teachers as well. In this context, on the one hand we have the schools, which now have little surplus energy, not to mention a lack of financial support, to deal with these high-level requests from parents, so they are at times caught in a dilemma. Given these changes, we have seen an increase in teacher suicides and cases of teachers suffering from mental illness, notably depression, lately attracting considerable attention as social problems. On the other hand, there is also a problem with traditional ways of thinking. Schools and those who work in them continue to have an authoritarian consciousness, thinking that parents should follow the logic and convenience of schools. Schools thus turn down reasonable requests from parents without good reason. Schools need to respond to these changes of the times and society, accept parents' request, and try to improve school management. In this paper, given the present situation where parents and teachers each actively assert themselves, how can better relationships be created between these two groups? We will examine some of the political prospects and problems by examining: 1 .The causes of difficulties in parents and teachers getting along with each other 2. The suicide of a new female teacher 3. The structure of parents' distrust of the school and bringing a suit against the school 4. The cause of an explosion of troubles between parents and teachers 5. The implementation of a policy for an improvement of the relationships between parents and schools

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The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the construction of equal educational opportunity through participatory democracy and to examine the related changes and to make clear the affinity between "distribution" and "dominant culture" inherent in the distribution of resources as a compensation principle, focusing on the "justice" and the "equality" concepts of Iris Marion Young and Kenneth Howe. In the past, research on equal educational opportunity was based on providing compensation to disadvantaged persons. However, aporia of reproducing the dominant culture existed in the distribution of resources as a principle of compensation. The concept of participatory democracy is useful in overcoming such aporia. Young criticizes distributive justice as disregarding the institutional context which has produced injustice. This institutional context does not accept a different cultural value in order to understand a constituent's cultural value to be mainstream culture. She notes that participatory democracy is useful because such a difficult point can be overcome, the reason being that a group with different cultural values can insist on its needs if it is based on the idea of participatory democracy. Howe developed the research of Young further, criticizing the idea of equal educational opportunity based on compensation theory, such as Head Start Education, as increasingly marginalizing children already marginalized. The theory of participatory democracy overcomes this problem because the affinity between mainstream culture and schooling is separated, and children feel an approval of different cultural values. This paper has considered the "justice" and "equality" concepts of Iris Marion Young and Kenneth Howe. One clarification is that the theory of participatory democracy enables a needs manifestation of a group with different cultural values and that children who have a separate affinity from mainstream culture and schooling and children who have different cultural values, can be supported in the system.

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The main purpose of this article is to clarify why Civic Education was restored on during the Educational Reforms of the 1980s in France. Citizenship education is an important research agenda today. In France, citizenship has been expected to be promoted by the study of Civic Education. Taking a general view of its historical transition, Civic Education in the postwar days came to be gradually avoided because the morality of the time was related to the bourgeois social systems of the prewar days. However, Civic Education was restored as an independent subject in 1985. In this sense, it is understood that there was thus a turning point in the French education in the 1980s. Moreover, following the period of low growth of the early 1970s, the French Republic was forced to transform itself away from traditional republicanism. As the immigration issue then revealed, the idea of universalism, that all people were equal citizens before the law, had already become difficult to apply given the social and political situation of France at that time. It became necessary in this context to ask how to develop citizens in schools while a major transformation was being socially urged upon the French Republic. Up until that point it was thought that developing citizens at schools was the foundation of the French Republic. With these points in mind, this article searches for clues as to how and why educational policy regarding citizenship has developed in France since the 1980s. To attain such a goal, this article focuses on the political context and logic surrounding the restoration of Civic Education. It mainly examines the following three points : (1) the political and economic structure which led to educational reforms in the mid-1980s, (2) the position of Civic Education in the educational reforms of the 1980s, and (3) the policy logic of political actors concerning the restoration of Civic Education. With the restoration of Civic Education in 1985, the following two factors can be seen as important. First, in the political club of the "modern Republic" over which Minister of Education at the time Chevenement presided, a key factor can be seen as the sharing of intentions of politicians and theorists, especially when it came to reform visions and the revival of Civic Education. Second is the fact that the content of Civic Education was based on an understanding of the "values of the Republic" (human rights and democracy), while at the same social science content permeated key provisions of the majority of the legal system. The political club of the "modern Republic" had an expectation for the development of citizens who would be able to undertake the "values of the Republic", and planned for a logic that promoted the restoration of Civic Education. In conclusion, it can be said that the restoration of Civic Education in the Chevenement Reform was an attempt to grope for "Modernization." In other words, this was in line with the problem with which France had to grapple in international society at the time, that of aiming to find a solution to human rights issues and racism, just as it aspired to "Modernization" and the establishment of a humanism that looked to the global view.

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This is a case study concerning the setting up of "Children's Affairs Departments" under municipal administration organization reform. It pays attention to the difference between "Department Head" and "Board of Education" approaches to goals. The purpose of this article is to clarify what differences may be caused by the jurisdiction of "Children's Affairs Departments" in the role of a common curriculum and teacher consultants for kindergartens and nursery schools, and to obtain suggestions concerning the originality of the educational administration system. To achieve this purpose, it classified the approaches observed into "Department Head" and "Board of Education" as an hypothesis. The differences caused by the "Department Head" and "Board of Education" approaches concerning the "Unification of Kindergartens and Nursery Schools Policy" are examined. Two findings were obtained through the analysis. First is the point that differences were seen in terms of childcare targets. It can be said that the "Board of Education" approachwill concretely show its target, while "the Department Head" approach sets up an abstract goal. Second is the point that a difference was seen in terms of the roles of teacher's consultants. Clarification in terms of guidance permeated the idea of a common curriculum in the "Board of Education" approach, while guidance was seen as brewing from the idea of a common curriculum with the "Department Head" approach. The result is that the "Department Head" approach can be seen as a point of view where an abstract idea is central and the autonomy of facilities is valued. Therefore, teacher's consultants tend to do guidance as a way to bring change through the common curriculum. On the other hand, the "Board of Education" approach can be viewed as a point of view where a concrete idea is central. Therefore, it was shown that teacher's consultants tend to do guidance that attempts to infiltrate the idea of a common curriculum. As a suggestion concerning the originality of this research for educational administration, it can be noted that teacher's consultants play a significant role. Teacher's consultants are coordinators who connect the Superintendent of Education to the roles of facilities. It can be said that in this respect these consultants are one of the key system characteristics for educational administration. However, the hypothesis and the suggestions extracted from this research were obtained from a limited case study. This will need to be expanded upon in the future. Moreover, it will be necessary to measure the elaboration of certain important analytical indicators of differences in these corresponding institutional settings.

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The purpose of this paper is to clarify the characteristics of schools (the characteristics of students) under the school choice program, using statistical analysis of a survey to parents. The aim of this analysis is to demonstrate how the characteristics of schools (the characteristics of students) differ, depending on the proportion of students who have the will to go to higher schools, using the following four perspectives. The first perspective is the amount of money spent on the out-of-school education (out-of-school expenditure). The second perspective is the expectation of parents regarding the final educational level of their children (educational expectation). The third perspective is whether or not the parents concerned the most about the achievement level of the schools when choosing schools for their children (emphasizing of educational achievement). The forth perspective is the amount of educational concern parents have regarding their children's education (educational concern). The theoretical concern of this paper is "the mechanism of homogenization and differentiation" (the school promotes homogenization inside the school while promoting the differentiation of each school with regard to the student's characteristics) and the "cream-skimming" (some schools take students with the background of high socioeconomic status out from their neighborhood schools, leaving less educational benefits for those left behind). The case of this research is Shinagawa Ward, which is the most popular area where school choice program has been implemented. The data used in this research comes from the survey conducted by Shinagawa Ward Board of Education, which was supported by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology "Program for Developing New Educational Systems" (2007). The response rate was 82.4% (4647/5639). This paper basically adopts multilevel modeling as statistical model, but when the value of the variation of error terms was zero or not statistically significant at the group level, other models (ex. ordered logistic regression) were used. The following are the findings of this research. In the elementary school level, a difference in the characteristics of students was found between schools with a high proportion and a low proportion of students who have the will to go to higher schools. Particularly, the scores of out-of-school educational expenditure, parents' educational expectation and educational concern of parents were relatively high in the popular schools. These facts imply that students from educationally eager family gather around so called popular schools, and so it can be said that "the mechanism of homogenization and differentiation" and "cream-skimming" are shown by these facts. The school choice program is a controversial policy, and various consequences (defects) are having been pointed out. This paper contributes to the accumulation of empirical analyses regarding the school choice program.

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The purpose of this study is to clarify the determinant factors of the parent segment in public elementary schools from the viewpoints of the interaction of the school, family efficacy, and community efficacy. The concept of "segment" is used in marketing research to mean a qualitative group divided by some standard or meaning. To be concrete, we would like to verify the hypothesis in this paper that the parents who trust schools increase in number by forming multilevel psychological networks : school staff and parents, parent and parent in the family, parent and parent in the school, and parent and community members. The inquiry here has as its objects the parents of six elementary schools (A to F Elementary Schools) in X Prefecture in Japan. School choice as a system has not been introduced to this district. A Elementary School and B Elementary School are large-scale schools located in newly-developed residential areas in the suburbs of the city. C Elementary School and D Elementary School are middle-scale schools located in a suburban area. E Elementary School and F Elementary School are small-scale schools located in a rural region. The 1,859 parents of these six schools are the objects of inquiry. The research was carried out in February 2008. Answers were received from 1,563 parents, for a return rate of 84.1%. We distributed one questionnaire per household. The questionnaires were collected through the classroom teacher after being sealed. We told parents to send a reply concerning their child who was in the upper grades. The present paper only targets thosee questionnaires to which "mothers" replied for analysis (n=1,433). The results of the analysis are as follows. Cluster analysis was performed where five standard variables (intimacy, participation, cooperation, attachment, and expectation) were aggregated in an analysis of the parental segment. Four segments (adaptation, conflict, dependence, and avoidance) were separated out as a result of the analysis. Polynominal logistical regression analysis of what drove these four segments together into an explanatory variable was carried out. Explanatory variables included the parents' attribution factors (such as age, residence years, working form, spouse, and home economics), the interaction with school, family efficacy, and commumity efficacy. Working form, spouse, interaction with the school, and community efficacy were recognized as crucial determinants of the parental segment as a result of the analysis. What especially stood out from the results is that the characteristics of the crucial determinant of the parental segment are mother's "time" and "isolation" problems. This paper will discuss these findings in depth.

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The purpose of this study is to clarify the effect of INSET (IN-Service Education and Training), which leads to the professional development of "excellent teachers" who have been annually recommended in all prefectural levels and commended by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology since 2006. In this study, the data collected from questionnaires supposes excellent teachers to be successful models of professional development in the teaching profession. This paper particularly analyzes the effect of off-the-job training on professional development which is one of the main forms of INSET. How could these excellent teachers come to achieve a level of professional development which deserves commendation? Their life courses can be model case of the personnel management of successful teachers : their college of education, selection, placement and transfers, and INSET, etc. There are many factors in terms of professional development. Above all of these, INSET is especially important, because it is directly connected with educational practice. Moreover, off-the-job training requires a great deal of public funds. Therefore, this paper will also examine its cost-effectiveness. The results of the questionnaire show the responses of excellent teachers as follows. First of all, there is little effect of the training by the educational administration, especially compulsory training, compared with other training. However, excellent teachers tend to think positively about their training, and this positivity can be seen as the basic factor in the effectiveness of their professional development. Secondly, the effect of "long-term consignment training" is very high, especially having such training in graduate school. Excellent teachers think that it is the most fruitful and useful for them. They grapple with their training themes aggressively in order to get good personal results. Moreover, these teachers can also receive many indirect influences, such as mutual enlightenment from their peers and so on. Finally, the effect of "off-the-job training" varies according to the school level and specialized field in which the teacher instructs. Excellent teachers who specialize in "club activities" and those in "senior high schools" feel compulsory training to be particularly ineffective, and tend to develop themselves by their own means. Continuing this theme for a future subject, it is necessary to expand the scope of this study in terms of the effects of "on-the-job training" and "self development," and to add interview research in order to conduct a comprehensive analysis.

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