The Politics of Structural Education Reform

Keith A. Nitta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135896157
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Education policymaking is traditionally seen as a domestic political process. The job of deciding where students will be educated, what they will be taught, who will teach them, and how it will be paid for clearly rests with some mix of district, state, and national policymakers. This book seeks to show how global trends have produced similar changes to very different educational systems in the United States and Japan. Despite different historical development, social norms, and institutional structures, the U.S. and Japanese education systems have been restructured over the past dozen years, not just incrementally but in ways that have transformed traditional power arrangements. Based on 124 interviews, this book examines two restructuring episodes in U.S. education and two restructuring episodes in Japanese education. The four episodes reveal a similar politics of structural education reform that is driven by symbolic action and bureaucratic turf wars, which has ultimately hindered educational improvement in both countries.

1 Introduction

Education is traditionally regarded as a domestic issue. Policy decisions about what will be paid for, what students will be taught, who will teach them, and where they will be educated are made with regard to national histories, cultural norms, and local political conditions. Over the past two decades, however, global management trends have influenced similar changes to K–12 education systems worldwide, including two of the most different systems in the industrialized world: the United States and Japan.

In the United States, beginning with the establishment of common schools, local communities have traditionally controlled their own schools. Even though states have legal responsibility for public schooling and the federal government has increased its education spending, each district has traditionally developed its own curriculum, hired and allocated personnel, set its own school admissions policies, and created its own annual budgets. This fragmented structure has created variation in teacher quality, spending, curriculum, facilities, and student achievement among school districts.

In Japan, the Meiji leaders of the late 19th century created a unified national education system in order to catch up with the West. They established a national Ministry of Education to control every aspect of education. The Education Ministry and its advisory councils (shingikai) have traditionally set a mandatory national curriculum, teacher training and pay regulations, school attendance rules, and guidelines for education spending. In Japan’s hierarchical structure, the traditional role of local communities and school personnel was to faithfully implement Education Ministry bureaucrats’ policies.

U.S. and Japanese education systems’ main similarity was that each was dominated by educational specialists: elite educational bureaucrats, national legislators specializing in education, and educational interest groups, in particular teachers’ unions. These closed education policy communities produced policy stability and incrementalism. Studies of Japanese education policy by T. J. Pempel, Leonard Schoppa, and Robert Aspinall have described a Japanese education policymaking system easily deadlocked over controversial issues.¹ Studies of U.S. education policy by Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan Scovronick, Michael Kirst, and Terry Moe describe how structural fragmentation, norms protecting local control of schools, and powerful interest groups have impeded significant national education reform.²

Nevertheless, in recent years, U.S. and Japanese national governments have both restructured their education systems in ways that challenged traditional power arrangements. In 1994, for the first time ever, the U.S. federal government mandated a national education policy for states and districts. The Goals 2000 and Improving America’s Schools Act required states to set curricular standards for all public school students and to assess student performance on those standards. In 2002, the federal government enacted the No Child Left Behind Act, which required states to install a specific testing and accountability regime. In Japan, the national government formally deregulated and decentralized the education system after decades of policy immobility. The 1997 Program for Education Reform authorized the first public school choice programs as well as six-year secondary schools. In 2004, the Trinity Reform decentralized control over billions of dollars in national education funding to prefectural governments. It also opened a window of opportunity for Education Ministry bureaucrats to enact a mandatory national student achievement test, an independent school evaluation system, and tighter regulation of school personnel.

Three global trends in the education policymaking environment—widespread belief that failing schools threatened economic competitiveness, widespread acceptance of New Public Management, and weakening and divided education interest groups, particularly teachers’ unions—facilitated a politics of structural education reform very different from traditional education policymaking. With broader participation, different dominant actors, a different agenda, and different political cleavages, structural education reform politics were unpredictable, faddish, and chaotic compared with traditional education reform politics (Table 1.1).

The politics of structural education reform revolved around a series of partnerships between national politicians and elite bureaucrats. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Ryutaro Hashimoto, and Junichiro Koizumi attracted attention to perceived problems with the education system’s structure and built winning reform coalitions. Elite bureaucrats from the U.S. Department of Education, White House, Japanese Cabinet Office, Ministry of Education, Ministry of International Trade and Industry, and Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications networked in policy circles and shaped the terms of debate to make structural education reforms feasible and legitimate.

The core partnership was supported by state-level leaders from the National Governors’ Association in both the United States and Japan and U.S. Council of Chief State School Officers, as well as leading business associations such as the Japan Federation of Business (Keidanren) and the Business Roundtable.

The structural education reform agenda in both the United States and Japan drew heavily from the New Public Management (NPM). As opposed to traditional education reforms, structural education reforms explicitly avoided addressing curriculum, instructional strategy, or educational resources. Instead, the NPM promised to improve education by focusing on performance rather than “inputs,” such as money, facilities, the number of teachers per student, or teacher quality. Rather than worrying about these issues, structural reforms promised to improve student learning by simply redistributing authority in a “loose—tight” arrangement. If governments held schools tightly accountable for student performance but loosely regulated them to encourage local innovation, education would improve.

Table 1.1 Traditional Education Politics vs. Structural Education Reform Politics

	Traditional Education Politics	Structural Education Reform Politics
Main Participants	Predictable:	Unpredictable:
	Education Specialists	Presidents, Governors, non-education Bureaucrats + Education Specialists
Dominant Coalition	Education Policy Community:	Moderate Structural Reformers:
	• National, state, and district Education Bureaucrats	• National Politicians: Presidents and Prime Ministers
	• Legislators specializing in education	• Business Associations: Keidanren, Business Roundtable
	• Teachers’ Unions	• State Associations: National Governors’ Association
Dominant Agenda	• Curriculum	• “Loose-Tight” redistribution of authority
	• Instructional Strategy	• Focus on Outcomes/Performance, not on Inputs/Resources
	• Resources
Political Cleavage	• Political Party	• Local vs. Elite
	• Sectoral Issue	• Shifting, dependent on timing
Policy Process	Predictable, Immobile	Chaotic, Ad-Hoc
Policy Outcomes	• Incremental Change	• Waves of Change
	• Fragmented Policies	• Widespread adoption of trendy reforms

The restructuring trend in education swept the world, including countries as diverse as Britain, Sweden, Brazil, and Mexico. According to comparative education expert Hidenori Fujita, “The restructuring of education has been a global concern since the 1980s.”³ International organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) played important roles in spreading NPM ideas as best-practice educational management.⁴

In the United States and Japan, the partnership between national politicians and elite bureaucrats was built on a specific type of NPM restructuring. Government actors avoided politically polarizing reforms that empowered parents and businesses through tuition vouchers and outsourcing. Rather than holding schools accountable through market-based competition, the politicians and bureaucrats adopted a self-consciously moderate reform agenda with two core characteristics. First, schools should be held accountable for results, not “inputs.” Governments should tightly regulate performance, but not resources or process. Schools should be held accountable through evaluation systems based on standardized tests and centralized incentive systems, not through market competition. Second, educational authority should be realigned but only within the existing public education system.

In the mid-1990s, President Clinton and Prime Minister Hashimoto demonstrated how politically successful this moderate structural reform agenda could be; it has overshadowed more traditional education reform ever since. Instead of debating what to teach or how to teach, national debate has focused on who should decide what to teach and how to evaluate students and educators. The moderate reform agenda has also overshadowed more conservative market-oriented as well as progressive resource-oriented reforms. Education reform has focused on who should set curriculum, how to measure student achievement, and who should spend education budgets. It has not focused on how to create more competition among schools or how to redistribute resources more equitably.

As enacted, however, structural education reform in the United States and Japan diverged from experts’ recommendations and advocates’ plans. To win important symbolic victories, politicians allowed elite bureaucrats to craft the details of reform in ways that protected bureaucratic authority. As a result, the Japanese and U.S. national governments created “tight” accountability systems but did not deliver “loose” regulation to allow schools to innovate. U.S. state bureaucrats won significant curricular authority through standards-based accountability. Japanese prefectural bureaucrats gained billions of dollars of budgetary authority through fiscal decentralization. However, national governments failed to empower school leaders to build teams or identify spending priorities.

REFORM IN THE UNITED STATES VERSUS IN JAPAN

Because the United States and Japan are so different, one would also expect their structural education reforms to be different. This book highlights the many similarities in U.S. and Japanese structural education reform over the past fifteen years but recognizes differences that emerged in the U.S. and Japanese reform episodes.

U.S. and Japanese politicians and bureaucrats played different roles, and NPM reforms entered national education agendas in different ways. Although both Japanese and U.S. politicians were critical reform initiators, U.S. presidents more actively shaped reform initiatives and negotiated deals than their Japanese counterparts. Conversely, elite bureaucrats in both countries networked in policy circles and shaped reform to maximize bureaucratic authority, but Japanese bureaucrats were more proactive policy entrepreneurs. In fact, noneducational specialists from the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Internal Affairs as well as Education Ministry bureaucrats played key roles in structural education reform.

In the United States, structural reforms entered the national education agenda as education reforms; in Japan, structural reform initiatives ultimately included the education sector. Presidents Clinton and Bush applied structural reform logic to reauthorizations of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which are scheduled regularly. Japanese Prime Ministers Hashimoto and Koizumi orchestrated sweeping structural reform campaigns across several policy sectors that aimed to revitalize the stagnant Japanese economy and restore trust in the ruling conservative coalition. Hashimoto’s and Koizumi’s structural reform campaigns added education onto reform agendas midstream. They pursued education reform to win short-term victories that would allow them to pursue more difficult campaign promises, such as bureaucratic reorganization and postal privatization. Once structural reform ideas had been imported to national education agendas, they were incorporated by Education Ministry bureaucrats into later education reform campaigns initiated by Prime Ministers Mori and Abe.

EXPLAINING STRUCTURAL EDUCATIONAL REFORM TIMING: THREE GLOBAL TRENDS

Two recent studies of U.S. education policymaking seek to explain how the Clinton and Bush Administrations enacted interventionist federal education policies after centuries of local control and decades of piecemeal federal action. Patrick McGuinn argues that heightened partisan electoral competition combined with education’s increased political salience laid the foundation for a new education policy regime focused on standards, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Traditional U.S. and Japanese Education Policymaking
• 3 Explaining Policy Change in the United States and Japan
• 4 Winning With Moderate Structural Reform: Goals 2000 and the Improving America’s Schools Act
• 5 Institutionalizing Structural Education Reform: The No Child Left Behind Act
• 6 Structural Reform Invades Japanese Education: The Program for Education Reform
• 7 The Japanese Structural Education Reform Boom: The Trinity Reform and Education Rebuilding Council
• 8 The Politics of Structural Education Reform in Other Contexts
• 9 Conclusion
• Appendix: List of Interviews
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index