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We study whether autonomous schools, which are publicly funded but can operate more independently than government-run schools, affect student achievement and school segregation across 15 countries over 16 years. Our triple-differences regressions exploit between-grade variation in the share of students attending autonomous schools within a given country and year. While autonomous schools do not affect overall achievement, effects are positive for high-socioeconomic status students and negative for immigrants. Impacts on segregation mirror these findings, with evidence of increased segregation by socioeconomic and immigrant status. Rather than creating "a rising tide that lifts all boats," autonomous schools increase inequality

Principals (policy makers) have debated the progress in U.S. student performance for a half century or more. Informing these conversations, survey agents have administered seven million psychometrically linked tests in math and reading in 160 waves to national probability samples of selected cohorts born between 1954 and 2007. This study is the first to assess consistency of results by agency. We find results vary by agent, but consistent with Flynn effects, gains are larger in math than reading, except for the most recent period. Non-whites progress at a faster pace. Socio-economically disadvantaged white, black, and Hispanic students make greater progress when tested in elementary school, but that advantage attenuates and reverses itself as students age. We discuss potential moderators.

Individual teachers, administrators, and parents made tremendous efforts to continue educating the Commonwealth's children between March and June of this year. But no amount of dedicated individual effort could have overcome fundamental challenges: weak guidance to districts from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) against a backdrop of deficient knowledge and sophistication statewide with regard to virtual learning. Digital education has been empirically proven to be most successful when schools prepare and follow best distance learning practices. However, the Commonwealth lacks even the minimum technological infrastructure for virtual learning, as exemplified by districts scrambling to obtain electronic devices and internet connections during the school closure. It is encouraging that Governor Baker and the DESE have described a fall 2020 return to brick-and-mortar schooling--with appropriate health measures to maximize safety--as a significant priority. The present challenge is how to implement this much-needed return to school, optimally balancing the importance of in-person schooling with the countervailing importance of protecting against the virus. The following paper contributes important insights, based upon careful review of other countries that have already successfully reopened their schools. [Foreword written by David S. Clancy and Dr. John G. Flores.]

In July 2010, the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) voted to adopt Common Core's standards in English language arts (ELA) and mathematics in place of the state's own standards in these two subjects. The vote was based largely on recommendations by Commissioner of Education Mitchell Chester and then Secretary of Education Paul Reville, and on the conclusions in three studies comparing the state's standards with Common Core's, all financed directly or indirectly by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and all issued by organizations that are among the primary boosters of Common Core (Achieve, Inc., Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education). Nevertheless, annual state testing for school and district accountability continued as part of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) mandated by the 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform Act (MERA). To accommodate the adoption of Common Core's standards, tests were based on both the old standards and an annually increasing number of Common Core's standards until 2015, when all of the pre-Common Core standards in ELA and mathematics were archived, and the MCAS tests were presumably only Common Core-based. After the vote to adopt Common Core's standards in 2010, the state joined the testing consortium called Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), funded by the United States Department of Education (USED) to develop common tests for its member states (about 25 initially), but with the costs for administering the tests to be borne by the states and local school districts. Since 2011, PARCC has been developing tests that BESE is expected to vote to adopt in the late fall of 2015 as the state's official Common Core-based tests in place of Common Corebased MCAS tests. (Indeed, the commissioner of education and his staff at the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) have been implementing a transition to PARCC tests for several years.) BESE's official vote will be guided, again, by the recommendations of the same commissioner of education (who now also chairs PARCC's Governing Board), the current Secretary of Education James Peyser, and the conclusions reached in "external" studies comparing PARCC and MCAS tests as well as in about 20 studies directly authorized by PARCC. Two of the external studies are listed in the state's 2015 application to the USED for a waiver from No Child Left Behind Act requirements and are by organizations that had originally recommended adoption of Common Core. One, issued by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education in February 2015, claims that PARCC tests predict college readiness better than MCAS tests did. A second, to be completed by the Fordham Institute and a partner, is to be issued in time for BESE's vote. A third, issued in mid-October 2015 by Mathematica Policy Research (and requested by the state's Executive Office of Education) claims both tests are equally predictive of college readiness, although its report has major shortcomings. This White Paper will be a fourth external report on the question BESE's vote will address; it is motivated by our interest in providing an analysis of how MCAS and PARCC assess reading and writing. Much less national attention has been paid to Common Core-based assessments of reading and writing than of mathematics, yet reading and writing skills are just as important to readiness for college and career as is mathematics. This White Paper's central recommendation is that Massachusetts use a testing system for K-12 that is much less costly, more rigorous academically, and much more informative about individual student performance, and with much less instructional time spent on test preparation and administration, than the current PARCC tests. Both the PARCC tests and the current MCAS tests in grade 10 are weak, albeit for different reasons, and neither indicates eligibility for a high school diploma, college readiness, or career readiness. In essence, the authors recommend that BESE reject the PARCC assessment system and vote for the MCAS system but on the condition that the responsibility for developing and administering K-12 standards and tests be assigned to an organization in Massachusetts independent of DESE and the state's education schools. This organization must focus squarely on providing the best possible content standards from disciplinary experts in the arts, sciences, and engineering throughout the state and be capable of providing oversight of high school standards and tests. If carried out, these recommendations would ensure the legacy and future promise of MERA. The following are appended: (1) Critique of Criteria for Evaluating Common Core-Aligned Assessments, (2) Links to Public Hearings and Other Sources of Public Comment on MCAS or PARCC, and (3) A Randomly-Chosen Test Item Used on the 2014 Grade 10 MCAS Math Test. Also provided are additional recommendations, an about the authors section, and endnotes.

Differences in teacher quality are commonly cited as a key determinant of the huge international student performance gaps. However, convincing evidence on this relationship is still lacking, in part because it is unclear how to measure teacher quality consistently across countries. We use unique international assessment data to investigate the role of teacher cognitive skills as one main dimension of teacher quality in explaining student outcomes. Our main identification strategy exploits exogenous variation in teacher cognitive skills attributable to international differences in relative wages of nonteacher public sector employees. Using student-level test score data, we find that teacher cognitive skills are an important determinant of international differences in student performance. Results are supported by fixed-effects estimation that uses within-country between-subject variation in teacher skills.

Set against the backdrop of increasing economic interdependence in East Asia, the idea of regional integration is now being discussed as a long-term political process in the region. As in the field of the international economy, de facto integration and interdependence exist with respect to the internationalization of the higher education system in East Asia. Based on the results of a comprehensive Japan International Cooperation Agency Research Institute (JICA-RI) survey of 300 leading higher education institutions active in cross-border higher education, located in ten Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member Southeast Asian countries and three Northeast Asian countries (China, Japan, and Korea), this paper examines universities perceptions of the degree of cross-border activities, the significance of their expected outcomes, and their regional preferences for partners. The objective is to envision a direction for a future regional higher education framework in East Asia and to consider the policy implications of the internationalization of higher education in East Asia in the context of regionalization. The findings related to the degree of cross-border activities suggest a current perception that there is more prominent in conventional than in innovative activities, but that innovation will rise considerably in the future. With respect to the significance of expected outcomes,academic and political expected outcome are perceived to be more significant than economic expected outcome, which are nevertheless expected to be more significant in the future. Finally, in terms of their preferred regions of partners, universities in East Asia overall place a high priority on building partnerships within their own region. Yet, among Northeast Asian universities, North America is perceived as the most active partner. (Contains 3 figures, 21 tables, and 13 footnotes.) [This paper was prepared as part of a Japan International Cooperation Agency Research Institute (JICA-RI) research project titled, "Cross-border Higher Education for Regional Integration and the Labor Market in East Asia."]

As globalization and the knowledge economy spreads, the demand for highly skilled workers has increased and developing countries are engaged in cross-border higher education to develop high level human resources for their nations. Using data on a cross-border higher education program between Malaysia and Japan, namely the Higher Education Loan Project (HELP1 and HELP2), this paper explores whether publicly funded cross-border higher education programs have yielded their expected outcomes (i.e., employment immediately after graduation) over the last ten years in the context of the rapidly changing Malaysian economic and higher education landscape. Our findings indicate that the program has met its intended outcomes, that is, the graduates have been absorbed in the industries they intended to work in or have continued with further studies, which are both conducive to Malaysian national development. However, our findings on the rates of graduates staying after completing their degrees imply that factors such as the host country's immigration policies may influence the decision by graduates on where to work. (Contains 10 tables, 7 figures, 10 annexes, and 23 footnotes.) [This report was produced by the JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency) Research Institute. It has been prepared as a part of a research project of the Japanese International Cooperation Agency Research Institute (JICA-RI) entitled "Cross-Border Higher Education for Regional Integration and Labor Markets," co-led by Kazuo Kuroda and Takako Yuki.]

The increasingly competitive and globalizing environment of today's higher education market has compelled many colleges and universities around the world to revamp their academic programs and organizational structures by responsively addressing various contemporary issues raised by internal as well as external stakeholders. It is no exception that Japanese colleges and universities have gone through a period of dramatic transition over the last decade under considerable pressure and influence of the central government's stringent policy mandates. Although the government-led reforms have intended to support the domestic institutions of higher education in gaining a competitive edge and assuring the quality of teaching and research, a series of reform attempts are documented to have increased the workload of Japanese professors tremendously, while shifting their work balance from teaching- and research-oriented activities towards more administrative or service-related tasks. It is a shared concern that the excessive workload of administrative responsibilities on professors deteriorates the quality of student instruction and research productivity delivered by the academic staff. This study focuses on the amount of time spent by the faculty on administrative tasks and examines how their workload is influenced by the organizational scale and composition of supporting staff members as well as faculty colleagues. Our finding suggests that a mere increase of support staff would not necessarily reduce the faculty time spent on administrative or service-related tasks in Japanese universities. An increase in employment of part-time administrative assistants per se could indeed add heavier burdens on professors, due to their growing responsibilities in managing the larger scale of their organizations. Further simulation results demonstrate that the faculty workload in administrative tasks would most effectively be alleviated with the support from research assistants, provided that the same budgetary constraint is assigned to the organizational unit.

Within the last 50 years, the work-family-household arrangements upon which social policy systems in industrial nations were formulated have disappeared. This briefing paper examines how social policies of the United States, Japan, Germany, Italy, and France have responded. The paper is presented in two major sections. The first section describes family policies in each country concerning parental leave, child benefits/family allowances, child care, marriage/cohabitation, and divorce. The second section discusses the mixed effects of maternity leave on womens employment, the lack of a relationship between fertility and maternity leave and fertility and cash benefits, and factors that complicate the relationship between countries' social spending and child poverty. Job-protected maternity leave is described as the most basic entitlement reflecting public acknowledgment of the economic necessity of working motherhood. Analyses suggest that fertility rates do not seem responsive to cash benefits or other policies, such as extended maternity leave, that function as wages for motherhood. In countries where child care provisions are not widely available, lengthy paid leaves have the effect of bringing women into the home for long periods of time. The most important role of cash benefits is to reduce child poverty, as illustrated by patterns in the U.S., France, and Germany. The paper concludes by asserting that Western European nations family policy can be divided into two types, one in which the social welfare system provides a comprehensive array of universal family benefits and services, and the other in which benefits are nonuniversal and accompanied by higher child poverty rates. The United States fits neither of the European patterns and is characterized by several contradictions contributing to the lack of political support for families. (Contains 98 references.) (KB)

This paper focuses on learner autonomy, noting that learner autonomy is not a matter of institutional mode but of learners' internal attitudes, and that learner autonomy entails an awareness of both self-direction and collaboration between the teacher and students and between students and students. The paper suggests that a teacher's attitude toward his or her students might hold the key to learner autonomy. After describing learner autonomy and learner development, the paper examines several studies that investigated students' attitudes toward the learner's role and classroom learning. Data from focus group interviews, individual interviews, and journals written by English-as-a-Foreign-Language students at a Japanese university indicate that students were aware that they needed to be active as learners, and they seemed to seek interactions with others in their classroom learning. The main problem appeared to be in the gap between their awareness and their actual behavior (their internal perceptions of their need to participate versus their external passivity). (Contains 37 references.) (SM)

This paper discusses literacy, language education, language achievement, and bilingual education policies and practices in Japan. The paper first describes the Japanese writing system (consisting of the "kana" and "kanji" scripts) and notes that students typically study English from grade 7 to the first 2 years of college. The paper then addresses the historical background and current practice of language. The paper next notes the lack of an official definition for "literacy"; that various studies have come up with different "illiteracy" rates for Japan; and that Japanese children tend to score better on mathematics tests than students from other countries, but worse on vocabulary and reading comprehension. The paper then addresses language and education, noting that girls are better than boys in kana acquisition, the area in which the children grow up did not make any difference; and that kanji characters are learned easily and can be used to make compound words. The last section (1) notes that the percentage of students who did not read any books steadily increased while the acquisition rate of kanji characters remains high; (2) once students achieve a reasonably fast speed in word coding, its efficiency no longer distinguishes their overall language ability; (3) research suggests that a contextual approach to language teaching should receive more emphasis, especially for those with low language proficiency; and (4) bilingual education has not received much attention in Japan, which is regarded as a monolingual nation. Contains 44 references. (RS)

This paper describes the various barriers to comprehension that learners may encounter when viewing feature films in a second language. Two clusters of interfacing factors that may contribute to comprehension hot spots emerged from a quantitative analysis of problems noted in student logbooks. One cluster had a strong acoustic basis, whereas the other had a more cognitive or memory and attention basis. Acoustically-based misperceptions include the following: phonological misperception of consonant/vowel segments through addition/loss/substitution; misperception of proper nouns and foreign words and expressions; misperception based on loss, deletion, or substitution of entire syllables, especially if weakly stressed; faulty segmentation of word boundaries; phonological dialect or foreign accent difference; what the listener expects or does not expect the interlocutor to say; the listener's lack of information (or correct information) with respect to the topic under discussion; and the speaker's use of idiom or colloquialism. Among the suggestions for mitigating these barriers to understanding are pre-teaching foreign words, technical language, idioms, and colloquialisms; sensitizing learners to varieties of spoken English; encouraging the learners to reflect on what their assumptions are about the target film's genre and structure; and segmenting the film into scenes and then clustering and labeling the scenes according to learner generated analysis. (KFT)

There is growing evidence that students throughout the world no longer see the US as the primary place to study; that in some form this correlates with a rise in perceived quality and prestige in the EU and elsewhere; and further, that this may mean a continued decline in the US's market share of international students. There clearly are a complex set of variables that will influence international education and global labor markets, including the current global economic recession. Ultimately, however, we think these factors will not alter the fundamental dynamics of the new global market, which include these facts: the international flow of talent, scientific or otherwise, is being fundamentally altered as nations invest more in educational attainment and human capital; the US will continue to lose some of its market share over time--the only question is how quickly and by how much; and without a proactive strategy, nations such as the US that are highly dependent on global in-migration of talented students and professionals are most vulnerable to downward access to global talent, with a potentially significant impact on future economic growth. This study provides data on past and recent global trends in international enrollment, and offers a set of policy recommendations for the US at the federal, state, and institutional level. This includes our recommendation of a national goal to double the number of international students in the US over the next decade to match numbers in a group of competitor nations, and requires recognition that the US will need to strategically expand its enrollment capacity and graduation rates to accommodate needed increases in the educational attainment rate of US citizens, and to welcome more international students. Attracting talent in a global market and increasing degree attainment rates of the domestic population are not mutually exclusive goals. Indeed, they will be the hallmarks of the most competitive economies. (Contains 6 figures and 41 endnotes.)

This monograph describes a research program that will assess the cumulative effects of education policies on the teaching environment. It also focuses on how these policy outcomes affect the ability of schools to attract and retain highly qualified teachers and principals. The document presents the results of interviews conducted at two elementary schools that were intended to uncover how school-reform policies affected teachers. All of the nine teachers who were interviewed were in the process of incorporating standards, standardized testing, and/or accountability into their daily teaching regimens. The paper comments on the rapid pace of reforms, societal issues, resources for reform implementation, the quality of the teaching environment, and the implementation of future reforms. The interviews revealed that teachers tended to see negative outcomes from reforms, with such side effects as compressed teaching schedules and the neglect of certain subjects. The monograph then turns to schooling in England, Germany, and Japan in a comparative analysis of education policy in these countries. It provides the historical context of the school systems in all three countries, providing information on their governance and organization, how they assess students and provide them access to higher education, how they track students, how they educate students with disabilities, and how they train and develop teachers. (RJM)

This publication contains three papers on college student exchange between Japan and the United States. The first paper, entitled "The University of Massachusetts and Hokkaido University: A Case Study in Educational Cooperation," by Barbara B. Burn, describes the long-standing relationship between these two institutions in order to identify some of the main characteristics that have contributed to this relationship and as a means to explore some of the deterrents or impediments to educational cooperation between universities and colleges in Japan and the United States. The second paper, "Student Exchanges and the Use of Technology" by Jackson H. Bailey, discusses the diverse conflicts and difficulties that arise out of student exchanges between Japan and the United States and argues that these issues must be resolved because effective educational exchange is so important to education and technology in both nations. The third paper, "Morehouse College Offers a New Direction in Japanese African American Relations" by Lee Gallo, describes the in-progress development of a Japan-United States friendship commission and argues for the increased participation of black students in international exchange programs. (JB)

This study examines whether there are differences in men's and women's use of computers and the Internet in the United States and Japan and how any such gender gaps have changed over time. The authors focus on these two countries because information technology is widely used in both, but there are substantial differences in institutions and social organizations. They use microdata from several surveys during the 1997-2001 period to examine differences and trends in computer and Internet usage in the two countries. Their results indicate that there were significant gender differences in computer and Internet usage in both countries during the mid-1990s. By 2001, these gender differences had disappeared or were even reversed in the United States but remained in Japan. People not currently working have lower levels of IT use and skills in both countries regardless of gender, but working women in Japan have lower levels of IT use and skills than working men, a difference that generally does not occur in the United States. This finding suggests that employment status per se does not play a large role in the gender gap in Japan, but type of employment does. The prevalence of nonstandard employment among female workers in Japan accounts for much of the gender gap in IT use and skills in that country. (Contains 11 footnotes and 6 tables.)

A study examined the role of employer training in ameliorating skill shortages and enhancing productivity and competitiveness. The study established that formal training by specialized personnel accounts for only 5-10% of the time newly hired workers are engaged in training activities and that existing labor market research instruments fail to measure much of the informal training and on-the-job training (OJT) received by new employees. U.S. employers were found to devote less time and fewer resources to training entry-level blue-collar, clerical, and service employees than do employers in Germany and Japan. The lower U.S. training rate was attributed to the following: higher employee turnover and higher cost of capital in the United States, lower trainability of U.S. youth, lower rates of technological progress, and lack of information about the quality of the general human capital obtained from OJT. Clear evidence that most U.S. employers and workers underinvest in OJT was found. The study further confirmed that, although high-quality occupational training offered by schools ameliorates the problem of underprovision of skill training, school-based training cannot replace some kinds of employer training and is generally less effective than employer-provided training in providing the same skills. (Contains 126 references.) (MN)

Japan's economic success is clear evidence that purposeful investments in the educational quality of the work force pay major dividends in terms of enhanced productivity and increased competitiveness. The key elements of the Japanese system are, in fact, less than 40 years old. The current recession is a reminder of the transitory nature of economic trends. Within Japan, most discussions of the work force begin with the looming shortage of first-time workers and an expensive surplus of retirees. The Japanese have a relatively limited number of alternatives: increased use of female workers, greater use of older workers, increased number of guest workers, basic redistribution of workers from labor intensive sectors, and accelerated export of production jobs. The tightness of Japanese labor markets is a function of migration patterns that have yielded an economy and population increasingly concentrated in three areas: Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya. Side effects of educational competition include dwindling numbers of students in technical and vocational schools and increased costs of educating children that deter larger families and prolong the effects of the "baby bust." Changes for Japan may include a less rigid labor market, a shift to educational programs outside the firm, and an effort to apply the lessons of manufacturing efficiency to service sector industries. Numerous graphs and charts supplement the text. (YLB)

This study is a comparative analysis that addresses the question: to what extent has the relationship between parental socioeconomic characteristics and educational opportunities changed over time and why? The document suggests six hypotheses regarding change in the effects of social origins on education transitions: (1) modernization hypothesis: the effects of social origin on all transitions decline; (2) reproduction hypothesis: the effects of social origins decline on earlier transitions but not on later transitions; (3) hypothesis of maximally maintained inequality: the effects will only decline at those transitions for which the attendance rates of the privileged classes are saturated; (4) socialist transformation hypothesis: socialist transformations brought about an initial reduction in the effects, that will then be followed by increased effects; (5) life course hypothesis: the effects decline across transitions but are stable across cohorts; and (6) differential selection hypothesis: the effects decline across cohorts, but the effects on later transitions increase across cohorts. The 13 industrialized countries included in the study may be classified according to their basic cultural and economic systems into three major groups: (1) western capitalistic countries: United States of America, (former) Federal Republic of Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Israel; (2) non-Western capitalistic countries: Japan and Taiwan; and (3) western socialistic countries: Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Study results show that educational expansion facilitates the persistence of inequalities in educational opportunity. Tables summarize the major findings with respect to educational expansion and attainment, change in the effects of social origins on highest education attained, and cohort differences. (DK)