High-Stakes Schooling: What We Can Learn from Japan’s Experiences with Testing, Accountability, and Education Reform by Christopher Bjork (review)

Christopher Bjork provides a stimulating account of recent developments in Japanese compulsory education, especially the response of teachers and parents to the Ministry of Education’s call for a more relaxed, exam-free educational experience. The recent U.S. reform movement, in contrast, has focused on constructing extensive centralized testing in order to both monitor student performance and strengthen school and teacher accountability (p. 25). In other words, according to Bjork, the reform rhetorics of these two systems aim in opposite directions.

The comparative “framing” of the book leads the reader to expect a balanced analysis of the respective reform processes. For example, the titles for most of the chapters imply cross-national comparisons: the title of chapter 2, “Framing the Education Crisis,” suggests a contrast of the U.S. and Japanese crises; that for chapter 3, “Examining the Impact of Reform Policies,” suggests more details on the respective reform processes; that for chapter 4, “The Teaching Force,” suggests a comparison of major features of the teachers in the two systems. But, in fact, most chapters (3 to 8, 10, 11) focus exclusively on the Japanese case with little or no mention of parallel phenomena in the United States.

The main argument in chapter 3 is that most past studies of Japanese schools have not looked at a sufficient diversity of types of schools. Rural schools are not as likely to be academically intense as urban schools. Secondary schools are more likely to focus on academics and hence are more resistant to the recent call for greater “relaxation.” True, but don’t we know these things?

Chapter 4 notes that Japanese compulsory education teachers are carefully selected and tend to be well educated in their subject area—and much of Japan’s educational success derives from these realities rather than from some secret of Japanese pedagogy. Chapters 5 and 6 summarize many of the author’s observations from his several years of examining Japanese compulsory education. Chapter 7 looks at curricular reform in Japan. Chapter 8 focuses on changes in the ways teachers and students relate to each other—students are more confident and less respectful than they used to be, teachers are less tolerant of student misbehavior. These are all excellent chapters, but one often wonders what is their relation to the questions raised at the beginning of the book.

One of Bjork’s major findings is that Japanese compulsory education schools are far more “autonomous” than generally believed. This finding is supported by videotapes of classrooms and cross-national reactions to these videos (reported in chapter 10). So we can say that schools and teachers have the room to make a difference. Another major finding concerns the quality of instruction in Japanese primary schools. Primary school teachers are well trained and enthusiastic. These positive aspects fall off in the middle schools.

Bjork notes that testing in the United States is used for the allocation of resources. He implies that testing is similarly used in Japan, but that is not the case. In Japan, in most cases testing is carried out on a sample of students (whose identities are carefully protected), and researchers are not allowed to link these individual scores to particular schools or classrooms. In other words, Japan’s centrally administered tests are primarily used for research, not for selection.

In chapter 9, the author returns to the educational crisis in the two countries. He observes that the reforms in Japan were largely thwarted by Japan’s exam-driven system. And the reforms in the United States were compromised by the decentralized nature of the U.S. system. The author then expands his scope to take a look at other promising educational reform models—specifically, he points to reform efforts in nearby Asian countries that largely...