Evaluations by parents of education reforms: evidence from a parent survey in Japan

Abstract

We examine how Japanese parents evaluate the current education system and assess possible reforms, based on a nationwide parent survey. Parents who have higher educational background, occupational status, and household income and expect higher education attainment from their children tend to be less satisfied with the current system and more in favor of school choice and voucher programs. They are also more willing to pay for additional education provided by public schools. These findings point to the possibility of student sorting caused by the different responses of parents to market‐oriented reforms, even if overall efficiency in education can be improved.

Keywords:

• school choice
• school voucher
• willingness to pay

Notes

1. Respondents whose youngest children were pre‐school were asked to evaluate based on information available from mass media and other informal sources.

2. To get a sense of the extent to which participants in the CAO Internet survey are less satisfied with the educational system than are other persons, it is useful to compare the responses with those of a different non‐Internet survey. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) conducted a nationwide survey of parents’ attitudes toward education in 2005. This non‐Internet survey covered 6742 adults who had students attending 15 elementary schools and 10 junior high schools. The question sheets were distributed and collected by schools. The response rate was 68.5%, which is somewhat higher than the CAO survey.

The MEXT survey asked parents about their general assessments of their child’s schools, and answers were chosen from among the following four choices: ‘very satisfied,’ ‘somewhat satisfied,’ ‘not so satisfied,’ and ‘not satisfied at all.’ This roughly corresponds to the question about the parents’ evaluations of the current school system in the CAO survey, although the latter includes ‘neutral’ between satisfaction and dissatisfaction. The MEXT survey results were: ‘very satisfied’ = 5.5%, ‘somewhat satisfied’ = 64.5%, ‘not so satisfied’ = 24.9%, and ‘not satisfied at all’ = 2.6%.

Although the question and choice categories were not exactly the same in the two surveys, the CAO respondents seem to have been less satisfied with the school system. The share of the most positive evaluation category was 1.9% in the CAO survey (‘very satisfied’) compared with 5.5% in the MEXT survey (‘very satisfied’), while the share of the most negative evaluation was 7.3% (‘very dissatisfied’) and 2.6% (‘not satisfied at all’), respectively.

3. We additionally estimate the ordered models with the original five categories for evaluating the current school system and teachers, as well as the attitude towards introducing school choice and vouchers, and find no significant difference from the results in Tables 2–5.

4. Based on Euro/Yen exchange rates – 148.45, as of September 2006 (when the survey was conducted) – the band of each option is approximately equivalent to ‘0 euro,’ ‘Less than €7,’ ‘€7–20,’ ‘€20–34,’ ‘€34–67,’ ‘€67–202,’ ‘€202–337,’ and ‘€337 or more,’ respectively.