教育経済学から見た教育行政学の課題(II 教育行政学への問いかけ)
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概要
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Education has many interesting aspects, and it can be approached from various disciplines, not only narrowly-defied by scholars of education but also from the perspectives of social science, psychology and other disciplines. Economics has an especially well-established research area, the economics of education, with academic journals published in the U.S. and Europe. In Japan a number of economists have recently criticized the government's educational polices and proposed alternative reforms. There appears to be, however, some misunderstanding about the economic approach to education, particularly regarding the role the market mechanism plays in education. There are two purposes to this short essay. The first is to briefly explain how economists analyze education and what kind of policy proposals they tend to make regarding education. The second is, based on the first discussion, to point out some issues which economists hope researchers of educational administration might tackle in Japan. The main conclusions are summarized in what follows. First, educational administration research should accumulate more empirical analyses, which are based on micro-data and which use rigorous econometric methodology. These are indispensable for qualitative assessment of the outcome and efficacy of education policy. Also, the government should establish panel data which can trace the educational background, job experience and other information of each sampled individual. Many researchers in Japan tend to assess educational policy and discuss its reform without any empirical analysis, in sharp contrast to the U.S. where there is a rich literature of micro-econometric research on educational attainments. Second, educational administration research should pay more attention on various aspects of education. Among others, "efficiency" and "equity", or their trade-off relationships, are important issues to be addressed when discussing educational reform. Education is expected to raise the productivity of each individual, but not proportionally, which requires careful discussions about the institutional and financial issues of public education. Neglecting this aspect of education may well lead to unexpected and unwanted outcomes from educational policies, as clearly evidenced by the recent failure of the Japanese government's policy to slim down the curricula of elementary and junior high schools. Third, educational administration research should explicitly take into account the socioeconomic factors surrounding education. Education has a unique aspect in that consumers (students) take part in its production together with suppliers (schools), unlike ordinary goods and services for which consumers and suppliers are usually independent of each other. This aspect of education makes the outcome of educational policy heavily dependent on the socioeconomic and innate features of consumers, and in turn causes a feedback from this education to individuals. This issue has recently become more critical in Japan as we see a clear trend towards social stratification through education.
- 日本教育行政学会の論文
- 2004-10-08