Many countries including Japan have promoted radical education reforms guided by neo-liberal and quasi-market ideas. But no appropriate evidence has been provided to show their validity and effectiveness. They are promoted by ideological preferences and in the populistic political atmosphere.
Given this situation, this paper first identifies some major features of the following five quasi-market models; simple school choice, education voucher, alternative schools, charter school, and school management by for-profit company. The aspects examined are the institutional idea, framework of school choice, school budget, school management system, freedom from government control, form of parent participation, and the influence of each model over the whole education system.
Secondly, the paper discusses the five major problems that are neglected in their arguments and will damage the public education system.(1) Due to the fact that school is an institutional good, school choice will differentiate schools both substantially and relatively on such evaluation criteria as academic success, school safety and social attributes of students and neighborhood atmosphere of each school.(2) Due to the fact that school is a collective and unfinished (or half-finished) good at the time of choosing and entering, the school performance and its evaluation depend on the students who are recruited to each school, and accordingly, school choice differentiates schools in terms of students' and their parents' attributes.(3) Under the system of alternative school, charter school or for-profit management school, school choice and other privileged conditions applies only for those schools and their clients, and accordingly, those schools should be recognized as ones for the privileged small number of students. It should be also recognized that if these systems spread widely, then the utility of their privileges will diminish and various problems intrinsic to school choice will also spread.(4) School choice ideas put a prior value on institutional choice, while neglecting the importance of practical choices within each school as well as the fact that someone's freedom of institutional choice restricts the range of the other's.(5) Deregulation of government control and the accountability requirement will result in the rise of market control and other type of government control for quality assurance like the school inspection by quasi-public agency and testing of achievement standards. Under the system of school choice, parents are likely to behave as consumers/claimers rather than organizational members who should cooperate in the process of finishing their un-finished goods.
Finally, the paper suggests that all of these will become seriously problematic in the country like Japan where the levels of equal opportunity, efficiency of schooling and parents' concerns of school ranking are high.

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School choice is a controversial issue. Current school reform in the U. S. is based on market mechanisms, and recently many people have been seeking alternatives in the public sector including charter schools and voucher schemes. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the ‘Controlled Choice Plan’ in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In ‘Politics, Markets, & America's Schools’, John Chubb and Terry Moe made the case for public school choice based on market controls and their ideas have given great impetus to the subject. They tried to present the Controlled Choice Plan in Cambridge as a typical case of school choice reform in the public sector. In their assessment the Cambridge plan has been a huge improvement in comparison with the troubled past; the racial imbalance has dramatically changed for the better, student achievement scores are up, teachers are more satisfied with their jobs, parents and students are happier with their schools and the public schools are winning back students from the private sector. They also claimed that ‘the Cambridge plan did not go far enough’, as the supply side remained under the control of all the usual democratic institutions, such as the central office and Cambridge resident experts.

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The purpose of this study is to discuss Grubb's concept of integration through analyzing the vocational and academic integration in "new vocationalism" which he addresses. Traditionally, the system and the purpose of vocational education have been separated from those of academic education in American high schools. However, this separation comes to be reconsidered mainly by the political and business worlds, claiming since 1980s, that schooling should prepare competitive workforce in the world economy. Professor Grubb at U.C. Berkeley, one of the most influential in American vocational education, calls this trend "new vocationalism", which consists of following strands: 1. A Nation at Risk: The Imperatives for Educational Reform (A Nation at Risk), 2. What Work Requires of Schools A SCANS Report for America 2000 {A SCANS Report), 3. The Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Education Act of 1990 (Perkins Act), 4. The School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994 (STWOA), 5. The Systemic Approaches to Integration: (1) The Academy Model, (2) Occupational High Schools and Magnet Schools, and (3) Occupational Clusters, Career Paths and Majors. These are the points of view to consider this "new vocationalism": the occupational and academic contents in integrated programs, target population, reforming just vocational education or restructuring the entire high school, and whether to change pedagogy or not. They are the points at issue Grubb articulates from the historical analysis of vocational and academic integration. According to Grubb, A Nation at Risk is conservative in both of the content and the teaching method, and A SCANS Report, Perkins Act and STWOA don't integrate vocational programs with academic programs, though they adopt some kind of integration by their own definitions. On the contrary, Grubb insists the systemic approaches integrate these two programs. He suggests they are broader preparation, encompassing various occupations, incorporating a greater variety of academic material. This broad-based education, he says, is appealing to students with a wider range of aspiration and backgrounds, then provides the substantial ways of restructuring high schools. He also points out the integrated curriculum itself becomes an incentive to change pedagogy. By using projects and cooperative learning, he tries to introduce the context of "meaning-making" into vocational education. As he mentions, the greatest ambition of integrating academic and vocational education is to reshape the whole high school, for all students and all teachers. Therefore, it is clear that Grubb puts the greatest importance on the systemic approaches to integration. The reason he aims to restructure the entire high school comes from his challenges about vocational education as following: it is a "dumping ground" for at-risk students, and high schools, with responsibilities for occupational sorting and preparation, are dominated too much by academic education not relevant for students' lives. That's why he attempts to give vocational education a proper position in high schools through the systemic integration with academic education. He argues that this type of education is based on Dewey's "education through occupations". The conclusion is, Grubb finds out, in the systemic approaches of "new vocationalism", the possibility to reverse vocationalism established around the turn of the century, which has prepared students only for employment after graduation, and very narrowly defined occupations. "New vocationalism" comes to give students opportunities to enter post secondary institutions as well as employment, and also high schools an impetus to restructure it, while he suggests that it involves danger to deprive itself of these innovations.

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The aim of this study is to clarify the availability of comparative studies for reforms of educational administration in Japan by reviewing comparative studies on school choices. Two viewpoints will be set for examining these studies. One is how they have discerned the conditions which made school choice systems function and the causes which made the systems malfunction. The other is how they extracted the factors which administrators will be able to manage or coordinate from foreign systems. After reviewing studies on school choice in the U.S.A. and in the U.K. authored by Japanese scholars, the following considerations were shown from the view points mentioned above. As to the first viewpoint, some studies about the British school choice system in Japan showed that the system has made social class division more serious because of the differences of ability to exercise parental right on school choice between social classes. The indications of difficult situations were shown by many studies. But insights for analysing background conditions were not sufficient. Many substantial works about the American school choice system in Japan have been done in recent years. Especially, some studies have pointed out the conditions and the causes considering function and malfunction of the systems. A school choice system in the public compulsory sector has recently been introduced in Japan. This reflects insufficiency in accumulation of study from the second viewpoint. As to the second veiwpoint, seven problems which Japanese educational administration will be confronted with were listed as follows : (1)Length of the term of office by a teacher in one school. (2)Application system for teachers allocation. (Reviewing the present nomination system) (3)Flexible arrangement of curriculum by each school. (4)Reexamination of grant system to private school sector. (For extending opportunities to choose private schools) (5)Restructuring super-selective schools. (6)Reviewing compulsory education system. (With reviewing possibility of education other than schooling) (7)Establishing the standard of school evaluation to encourage school innovations. To make the school choice system effective, many other reformations much be considered such as the arrangement of public relations by schools and considerations by local authorities to keep a community consciousness for families who have chosen schools other than those in their catchment areas.

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In this paper I discuss the theory projected by John E. Chubb and Terry Moe. Their book, Politics, Markets, and America's School has caused a popular debate. In this book they found that school organization is the most significant variable affecting student achievement. Chubb and Moe's central argument is that an effective school is characterized by an academic focus, a strong leader, shared decision-making, a high level of professionalism and cooperation among teachers, and respect for discipline among students. Following these findings, Chubb and Moe concluded that the best way to improve education in the United States is to establish school autonomy in every school. This requires every school to be free on bureaucratic control. Since the bureaucracy has been developed under the direct democratic control of education, both democratic control and the bureaucracy should be denied. In place of them there should be introduced one kind of market control of education. This is their theoretical argument supporting school of choice. Their argument is persuasive. One reason is that public education in the United States has been criticized but has not produced good results. The other reason is that it seemed to assure parents' rights to the education of their children. But there remain some serious problems. One is that the authors intentionally denied the aim and content of public common education. This is a very difficult but unescapable problem in a democratic society. The other point is that they put common interests in the education of people as exterior to education, thus losing a vital force in education. We should search for the way to strengthen the voice of parents and the community in education. Under these conditions the parents' choice of school programs is to be realized. In this context, too, a "controlled choice" plan should be investigated.

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