Category Archives: Policy

Challenges in Regulating Juku

Posted on July 13, 2011 by | Leave a comment

If policy-makers in Japan or elsewhere were to decide to regulate supplementary education, they would face a number of hurdles and challenges.

The first would be to define supplementary education in such a way that the “right” kind of businesses/organizations would actually be captured by this definition. I have struggled together with colleagues to come up with definitions of supplementary education as this sector and the state-recognized sector is shifting, but this would be even harder to do in a legislative context, I imagine.

A further hurdle would be enforcement. Would this be somehow handed over to local or national education authorities? Or, would this be treated as a quasi-business license?

One avenue that is obviously attractive to make regulation possible is to offer public funding for supplementary education activities and to make this funding contingent on criteria that would characterize supplementary education institutions. In some ways, this is the route that the U.S. No-Child-Left-Behind funding for tutoring to students who are enrolled in consistently “failing” schools has taken. In that case it appears to be local or state authorities who are in charge of “certifying” particular businesses or individuals as tutors. There don’t seem to be any unified criteria that are being applied in this case.

In the Japanese context, there do not seem to be formal criteria in the contracts that some Boards of Education (most noticeably in the 23 wards of metropolitan Tokyo) are entering into with juku to provide services within schools (konai juku). Such contracts could obviously include criteria like teacher certification (highly unlikely in the current Japanese context). Most likely they do include specification of student-teacher ratios, facilities to be used, etc.

The final option and one that supplementary education businesses in the more established sectors of this kind will likely push, is self-regulation, the seemingly instinctive response of all North American business groups to any hint at regulation, though somewhat less common elsewhere in the world.

Apparently, there were some discussions about versions of self-regulation between representatives of the largest education conglomerates and the Ministry of Education some years ago. These seem to have focused on some kind of teacher certification. I was told about such discussions by juku operators, but have been unable to follow up on whether these were formally reported or acknowledged.

Clearly, when dealing with a juku industry as sizeable as the Japanese one, the emergence of an industrial lobby will be one of the main obstacles to any attempts by governments (national or local) to regulate or even to structure supplementary education activities.

In the case of teacher certification, this would seem to put education conglomerates at a distinct advantage as they are already offering more formal forms of employment compared to the SME owner-operated sector. SME juku rely primarily on casual labour, often provided by former students. Requiring such casual labour to be certified in any way would likely incur prohibitive costs.

As I have argued in the context of questions regarding the efficacy of juku instruction, a requirement of teacher certification of some kind would likely lead to tutoring for such certification in its own right. Meta-tutoring anyone?

For further reading on teachers in private sector education, see:

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Posted in Juku in Japan, Julian Dierkes, Linda Quirke, Policy

Juku Policy: Areas of Regulation

Posted on July 11, 2011 by | 1 comment

Juku are currently not, nor have they been regulated in their function as education providers. They merely operate as any other service business would, i.e. with a business license.

The only regulation that has an impact on juku in terms of their teaching function is that teachers at public schools (in their role as public servants) cannot work at juku.

This is in contrast to other countries, for example South Korea, where supplementary education institutions are regulated as education providers not mere businesses.

In the South Korean case, hagwon are regulated primarily to attempt to reduce the impact that fee-based education has on access to education and thus on (in)equality. Attempts to regulate hagwon have stretched form an outright ban, to limits on fees that can be charged and hours of operation.

Similarly, in countries like Turkey where school teachers are directly involved in the provision of supplementary education, regulation is aimed at keeping track of hours worked by teachers in their regular school function as opposed to their supplementary education role.

Not only are juku not regulated in Japan, but the Ministry of Education continues to ignore them, at least officially when it comes to policy-making. Surely, some of the employees of the Ministry cannot have their heads buried so deep in the sand that they do not know about or acknowledge the existence of juku, especially as juku operators like to point out that bureaucrats are among the professions who are virtually guaranteed to send their children to juku.

I agree entirely with Mark Bray who has pointed out in several of his publications that it would behoove policy-makers to have an accurate sense of who is availing themselves of supplementary education, for what purposes, in what subjects, for how long and with what financial and equity consequences.

If policy-makers were to decide to address supplementary education based on an understanding of its operation, regulation could potentially focus on a) consumer protection, b) educational standards, or c) health and safety.

Consumer Protection

When it comes to quality assurance and consumer protection, there have been periodic discussions in Japan of encouraging or even requiring some kind of certification of instructors at juku. This would surely be welcomed by corporate juku, especially if the training required for certification would be relatively costly, but not intrusive on teaching methodologies, etc. Given the setting of the juku industry, a standardized examination comes to mind as an obvious solution, and corporate juku would surely begin to offer courses to prepare candidates for this examination within hours of its creation.

For smaller juku who rely on casual labour to a greater extent, certification would be yet another costly barrier to their operation. The introduction of some kind of certification may thus hasten the demise of smaller juku who may well be the more likely source of substantive innovation than corporate juku who are beholden much more to economic drivers in their operations.

Oddly, teacher certification or at least some kind of indication of any kind of teacher training does not seem to be demanded by parents, nor students, so any impetus for such regulation does not seem to be coming from consumers themselves.

Educational Standards

Another area of quality assurance and consumer protection would be a requirement to document the efficacy of juku offerings. This would obviously be very difficult in a situation where 塾生 are free to enrol and leave a specific juku at will.

Some kind of accounting for the efficacy of juku instruction would address consumer protection concerns as much as it would a concern for the quality of education provided and thus its contribution to national development.

Elsewhere I write about attempts to measure the impact of supplementary education. It would require a huge public effort to implement some kind of testing system that would give parents and students a real indication of any contributions that particular juku might make to the education of a student. This testing system would likely become such a monstrous beast in and of itself, especially in a system that is already rife with testing, though this would also mean that few parents or operators might object, that it would not seem to be worth the effort of offering more sophisticated consumer information.

In my mind these considerations demonstrate the absurd ends to which arguments for accountability can be taken.

Health & Safety

Addressing health and safety concerns related to children’s participation in supplementary education seems the most straight-forward measure to take. This seems to be, in fact, the approach that authorities in Taiwan and Hong Kong are taking, where they require the registration of juku as such and address safety standards through local regulation. Some possible measures could include regulation of maximum number of students per classroom (as in Hong Kong), minimum space and furniture standards for students, some kind of ombudsman role to report abuses, etc.

Many juku have implemented CCTV systems on their premises to assure students’ safety and they also offer systems that address safety (and truancy) concerns regarding students’ commute to and from juku. It has always struck me as ironic that the area of most active self-regulation on the part of juku seems to be the commute to and from the juku when crime rates and real dangers to students are in fact very low.

In another post, I write about challenges to regulating juku.

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Posted in Juku in Japan, Mark Bray, Policy, South Korea, Turkey

June 2010 Asahi Editorial: Education Reform from Below

Posted on June 17, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Last year (2010/06/16) I wrote an editorial for the on-line English edition of the Asahi:

POINT OF VIEW: While Policymakers are looking elsewhere, Japanese education is being reformed from below

Japanese elementary and high school education seems to have been lurching from one crisis to the next over the past 10 years.

From fears during the dot-com era that Japanese children were not being prepared for a post-industrial economy, to the apparent disaster caused by the implementation of “yutori” education, to the steady stream of social ills discovered in the nation’s schools–“ijime” (bullying); “gakyu hokai” (dysfunctional classrooms); “gakuryoku teika” (declining academic ability); and “futoko” (refusal to attend school)–politicians and the media continue to identify aspects of the decline of Japanese education.

By contrast, foreign observers might point to near-universal high school graduation, literacy and numeracy, as well as high rates of participation in higher education, as characteristics of the education system that call claims about a long-term decline into question.

Regardless of the empirical reality of a decline, the solutions to this decline are constantly sought outside of Japan.

Over the past five years, a number of models have been discussed at near-obsessive levels. From Indian arithmetic to the Finnish and Dutch education systems, pundits, academics and politicians seem to be travelling the world to find solutions to perceived Japanese problems at the national level.

Yet, few conclusions from these travels seem to get serious consideration by the apparently paralyzed Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Few politicians have the substantive expertise on education or the interest that would be necessary to evaluate claims of decline or alternative models to the extent that they could be implemented.

While a general sense of malaise permeates national discussions of education, local boards of education and schools are beginning to experiment with some very significant changes to public education, especially in Tokyo. Given the rarity with which political reforms in Japan bubble up from grass-roots experimentation, such efforts ought to be recognized, publicized, and considered for scalability to the national education system.

One of the areas of greatest experimentation has been emerging public-private partnerships (PPPs) in the schools of Tokyo’s wards. Originally pursued in the United Kingdom in the early 1990s, PPPs strive to harness private investments in public (infrastructure) projects and constitute an element in the so-called third sector. Toll roads are the paradigmatic examples of infrastructure PPPs. In Japanese education, PPPs are emerging where ward boards of education are signing contracts with supplementary education businesses (juku) to provide additional instruction to public school students on school premises in the afternoons and on weekends.

These “konai juku” are a daring experiment in that they are breaking with a decades-old attitude of confrontation between formal education and the shadow education world of juku and “yobiko.” The opposition to the existence of the juku system has been one of the few areas of policymaking where the formerly powerful Japanese Teachers Union (Nikkyoso) found itself in agreement with education ministry bureaucrats.

However, as the perception of significant shortcomings in public education has spread, local officials have increasingly looked to the supplementary education industry as a possible source for solutions.

Education PPPs now operate in all wards of metropolitan Tokyo. They have been created in the context of school choice that has been pushed down to the elementary school-level and encourage principals to seek distinguishing features for their schools that might stem the tide to private education in the capital. Coincidentally, the introduction of school choice has also been spearheaded by local efforts, most notably in Shinagawa Ward.

These PPPs take many different forms, some specifically targeting students who are underperforming, some aiming at the average students who have been somewhat neglected in public discourse, while others are providing the accelerated education and exam preparation for which some of the larger juku schools are famous.

Activities span from test-taking services, to classroom or individualized instruction, to teacher education seminars. While teachers and union officials are opposing these experiments in some schools, others are welcoming juku into the school for what they offer at the moment, a constructive experiment. One of the ironies of the entry of juku into publicly-run schools is that this signifies the re-introduction of Saturday school by stealth.

Juku are clearly not the panacea to end all educational ills that some proponents make them out to be. The scarcity of any research on juku means that claims of their efficacy and superior ability to tailor educational content to individuals and their learning needs, remain just that, claims. Whether or not one accepts the pessimistic view of contemporary Japanese education, however, experimentation with alternatives is an element that has long been missing in the highly-centralized education system, and these grass-roots efforts should be encouraged, nurtured and taken seriously.

While experimentation is to be welcomed, it should also be supervised and held accountable. Obviously, long-term contracts between private education providers and schools or boards of education have significant fiscal implications. They also bear the potential for creeping privatization of public education.

Boards of education should monitor these experiments very carefully and should themselves be held accountable for their experimentation.

I’ve written about the shift of power to grass-roots level in Japan on this blog as well.

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Posted in Education, Japan, Juku in Japan, Julian Dierkes, Policy, Press and Media

“Enduring Contexts”: The Shifting Balance of Power or Points of Initiative within Japanese Education Policy

Posted on May 2, 2011 by | 1 comment

Fascinating discussions on contemporary Japanese education with a specific focus on educational policy over the last two days in Montreal.

12 researchers gathered by Chris Bjork (Vassar College) and Gary DeCoker (Earlham College) to talk about “Japanese Education in the Era of Globalization: Enduring Issues in New Contexts”. Lots of specific points to write about from the presentations and discussions, but one of the main themes that struck me in the course of discussions was the changing role of the Ministry of Education in Japan.

While the pre-Asia Pacific War ministry was almighty, its postwar reincarnation was initially limited in its policy-making power by the U.S. occupation. With the end of the occupation, the Ministry was able to pull some of its administrative and policy-making power back into the centre in Tokyo (this is a crucial part of my analysis of postwar history education). Over the postwar period, the only significant opposition to the Ministry was 日教組 (Nikkyoso, the Japanese Teachers’ Union). I have thus been accustomed to characterize the Japanese education system through the high growth era as highly centralized with the Ministry representing the pinnacle of decision-making, as well as the source of policy initiatives.

This does not mean that the Ministry tightly controlled all aspects of education. History education might provide an example here. While textbook approval is supervised and organized by the Ministry (this has led to the frequent mistaken perception that Japanese textbooks are “government textbooks”), this approval process generates a list of approved textbooks that are then selected by prefectural and local authorities.

However, most of the discussions across a great variety of aspects of education (making these past two days fascinating, especially as they followed on a similar gathering with some overlap in the participating scholars at the AAS meetings) suggest that more and more policy initiatives originate in local efforts at the school or community level. The Ministry thus continues to set the context for education throughout Japan, but the leeway for local experimentation is expanding. And, some of this experimentation is leading to change in national policies or recommendations as well.

Beyond the examples discussed over the past two days, one of the most striking examples of this is the introduction of school choice in the past decade. While limited choice had been available to high school students in the past, enrollment based on catchment areas has been supplemented with various means of choosing an elementary and middle school as well.

This development was clearly spearheaded by authorities in Tokyo’s 品川区 (Shinagawa Ward), though with the approval of Ministry officials. After the introduction of school choice in Shinagawa in 2001 (I think), the system has spread to many other jurisdictions, though it has not become national policy as such. (For a discussion of the impact of these changes, see my article “Japanese Shadow Education: The Consequences of School Choice” [in Forsey, Davies & Walford, eds. The Globalisation of School Choice?. Oxford: Symposium Books, 2008.]

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Posted in CIES 2011, Enduring Contexts, Japan, Policy