学校選択制における不確実性の考察
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概要
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The key to understanding public school choices for compulsory education is whether choosers can have enough information to make a good choice. Generally scholars examine the distribution of information, "who gets more information than others", and advocate an enhancement of information provision for choosers as an implication. However, their research questions and implications are not adequate for understanding public school choices because institutional factors have been neglected in their analysis. The aim of this paper is to reframe the problem of information in terms of uncertainty and examine it in view of the institutional setting. Theoretically, the mechanism of the school choice is viewed from multiple points, such as negative-feedback, innovation by competition, peer-group effect, and congestion effect. Although there is some controversy about these mechanisms themselves, we need to proceed to the examination of the institutional context which surrounds the school choice, because it is the structural variable which affects the mechanism of the school choice and the degree of uncertainty for the choice. In the context of Japanese public schools, frequent changes of teachers in a short cycle and criterion of the class organization (gakkyu hensei kijun) are to be considered as institutional factors. Taking these into account, an empirical analysis with a quantitative method is conducted. The data are based on the author's survey which was conducted at public elementary schools of Shinagawa Ward Tokyo in July 2002 for parents having school-age children. The result is the following. (1) The uncertainty of the school choice is negatively correlated to parental consciousness about legitimacy of the school itself such as satisfaction with their own choice, loyalty and confidence. (2) As to the distribution of information, parents having more resources tend to collect more information about schools and those having less tend to collect less. However the effect of resources on their behavior is moderate. (3) Institutional factors affect the degree of the uncertainty. When institutional factors work, the uncertainty of the school choice increase and parents' efforts on collecting information end up in vain. The effect of institutional factors is substantially large. In light of the above discussion, we conclude that institutional factors seriously affect the degree of uncertainty, and that we need to theoretically and practically consider the consistency which emerges from a set of mutual complementary institutions.
- 2005-03-30