Against a backdrop of the diversification of values in Japanese society, this paper aims to evaluate the increasing popularity of public schools' attempts to guarantee publicness by implementing new procedures and justifying their outcomes. The paper makes the following two arguments:

Firstly, revision of the processes and procedures of school education, especially in student guidance, has the potential to promote publicness. For example, based on the relationship between publicness and the establishment of the Act for the Promotion of Measures to Prevent Bullying, this paper reveals:

1. increased official participation as a result of legal involvement in resolving issues related to bullying,

2. increased commonality as a result of recognizing the need for lawor guideline-based responses, and

3. increased openness as a result of bullying response procedures becoming transparent to the public.

It is argued that implementing such procedures is linked to increased publicness at a micro level in student guidance. In other words, it can be said that “procedure” occupies an important position as a condition in ensuring publicness.

Secondly, although there has been a noted rise in procedural justice theories in the field, some aspects of the procedures and operations regarding disciplining high school students lack transparency. Thus the guarantee of publicness remains questionable. More specifically, while official involvement is guaranteed, it is difficult to claim that commonality and openness are also sufficiently guaranteed. Today, procedural justice is viewed as important in educational settings; yet, the appropriateness of disciplinary results cannot be judged collectively. Therefore, establishing transparent disciplinary procedures that can be traced later is an important perspective in the guidance of students, and may well be useful in increasing trust in educational administration.

This study clarifies the influence of public opinion on policy making by focusing on the public comment system. After explaining the outline of the public comment system, quantitative characteristics of public opinion regarding education policy based on the data collected from The Office of E-Government and Information Technology (e-Gov) from 2003 to 2013 are analyzed. Furthermore, the influence of each opinion received through the public comment system on higher education policy making is discussed. We conducted a limited analysis on the degrees of interest in each policy because the quantitative responses of public opinion to each policy and the contents of individual or drafted opinion are only obtainable through e-Gov data. A detailed case study is required for future research to better understand the substantial influence of public opinion on policy making.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects and problems of Administrative Procedure Act on current educational administration. The Adiministrative Procedure Act became effective in 1994. The Administrative Procedure Act is applied to the administrative disposition on application, the detrimental administrative disposition, the administrative guidance and reports. The educational administration system must follow these procedures of the Administrative Procedure Act. These procedures guarantee Due Process in Educational Administration. But the procedures regarding discipline of students and teachers, educational administrative rulemaking, and educational planning are left in the future.

The contents of this paper are as follows:

( 1 ) Introduction

( 2 ) General administrative procedures concerning educational administration.

( 3 ) Educational administrative acts affected by the Administrative Procedure Act.

( 4 ) Unresolved procedural problems of educational administration

( 5 ) Conclusion