The Best Laid Policies...
Professors show error of educational reforms in Japan

Winter 2004, Volume 26, Number 1

Takehiko Kariya and James Rosenbaum

This October the Japanese Ministry of Education quietly revised its national curriculum after releasing the results of a long-awaited study on the effects of the 1998 national curricula reforms. For Takehiko Kariya, a professor at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Education and one of the reforms’ most vocal critics, this shift confirmed what his and other studies showed: Overall, Japanese students were studying less, watching more television, and at risk for greater socio-economic inequality.

The reforms were originally meant to ease “exam hell,” the extreme pressure on those high school students studying for competitive college entrance exams, while encouraging students at the bottom half of the achievement ladder to study more to increase their college prospects. “But the government cut 30 percent of curricula content without doing any research on the students’ academic achievement,” Kariya said.

“It’s a clear case of how a well-intentioned policy blew up,” said James Rosenbaum, professor of sociology and human development and social policy at Northwestern. He co-authored several papers with Kariya, including a chapter that provided empirical analysis of the Japanese government’s failed educational reforms.

Kariya spent four years working as a graduate research assistant with Rosenbaum at the Institute for Policy Research (IPR). The two collaborated on many studies in subsequent years, including one year when Kariya was a visiting fellow at IPR in 1998. “When I was at Northwestern, I was inspired by the great American social scientists, including many at the university, who played important roles in evaluating and being critical of U.S. policies,” he said. When he returned to Japan where data were not used in formulating educational policies, he started campaigning against the reforms.

The turnaround was due, in no small part, to Kariya’s persistence. To air his views, Kariya wrote newspaper articles, appeared on television, and published two books on the subject—the academic Education in Crisis and Stratified Japan, which sold 10,000 copies, and the best-selling paperback Illusion of Education Reforms, which sold 50,000 copies. “These are amazing numbers for such an academic subject,” Rosenbaum remarked. “American books on such topics rarely sell 1,000 copies.”

The Ministry of Education kept insisting there were not any problems and countered that it had the research to prove this. Kariya kept plugging away, reporting data from his and Rosenbaum’s research that clearly showed that the reforms were not working as intended.

Though the reform did achieve one of its initial goals in moderately reducing the stress levels for college-bound students by decreasing the amount of time spent on homework, the students in lower-ranked schools decreased their efforts precipitously; 80 percent were not doing any weekly homework in 1997, a dramatic increase over 1979 (50 percent). Contrary to government claims that students would shift to more creative activities, students—especially those in lower-ranked schools—were spending more free time glued to the television set. Students in the third-tier ranking of schools boosted their T.V. time by 52.1 percent over 1979 levels.

More disquieting was the indication of a growing socio-economic gap. The researchers noted homework helps to improve academic achievement, which can improve job and college prospects. When they looked at students’ social backgrounds, they found Japanese students with parents who do clerical, manual, and self-employed work decreased their homework time much more than students with parents in professional and managerial jobs.

The Ministry of Education finally released the results of its own study in December 2002. It flagged serious problems, including a large decline in math scores. In October it was recommended that schools should be allowed more latitude in teaching. “Although the ministry didn’t admit that their policies were wrong,” Kariya said, “they did change them.”

Though this happened in Japan, there’s a lesson for U.S. policymakers here as well. “Even the best-intentioned policies can wreak havoc if they are not informed by data,” Rosenbaum said.

For more information, please refer to Kariya’s and Rosenbaum’s “Stratified Incentives and Life Course Behaviors,” pp. 51-78. In Handbook of the Life Course, J.T. Mortimer and M.F. Shanahan, eds. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2003.