How the japanese learn to work 2nd edition - part 3

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How the japanese learn to work 2nd edition - part 3 Who goes where? 25useful supplement to their pensions. The test marks were standardized onthe whole 14-year-old population of the prefecture in a generally understoodfashion—10 marks above or below 50 for each standard deviation—so thatonly 5 per cent came above 70 or below 30. Since children’s effort inputtended to be fairly uniform, there was a relative stability in each child’sscores—his or her hensachi range, or range of ‘standard deviation scores’,tended to be relatively narrow. Since the success of last year’s pupils withhensachi rating x getting into high school y was carefully documented bythe teachers—the scores provided a good basis for advising pupils on whichchoice of high school to make. So much was this process the focus of parentaland teacher concern that ‘hensachi education’ became the boo-word parexcellence, summing up all that was stifling, uncreative and anti-educationalin the school system. The growth of such criticism led, in the early 1990s, to a ban on the use ofsuch commercial tests in schools. According to the teachers of the middleschool senior classes, who used pupils’ records on such tests to advise themas to which high school they should apply to, this has simply added to theirwork. They still have to give advice; that advice still has to be given on thebasis of children’s prospective performance, relative to other children, in thehigh schools’ competitive entrance examinations. The only difference is thatnow they have to make up mock tests themselves, which means extra workbut no extra pay (although one suspects that the money which used to bespent on buying the commercial tests is somehow channelled into teachers’allowances). Increasingly, they are devising tests collectively—all the schoolsin a town or wider area getting together—and in at least ten prefectures thisis already organized on a prefectural basis by the local education authorities.(The prefectures have formal jurisdiction and budget for (public) high schools.Primary and junior secondary schools are administered by the municipal/rural district tier of government.) The only difference is a cosmetic one; onlyraw scores on the tests are used; normalization and the calculation of a‘standard deviation score’ are studiously avoided. So who can call it ‘hensachieducation’ now? And meanwhile, of course, an estimated 50 per cent of third-year middleschool students—the 50 per cent who, or the parents of whom, are mostconcerned about which high school they get to—are going to private after-school juku where they still take the commercial tests, and still have theirstandard deviation scores measured. It is highly unlikely that they refrainfrom reporting these scores to their class teachers when the decision aboutwhich high school they should seek to enter is being made. The actual operation of the examination and selection system showsconsiderable local variety; in some prefectures with large school districts—a single catchment pool for eight or more schools, say—all the middle school26 How the Japanes learn to workteachers in charge of final year classes spend a horse-trading weekend where,in the light of the range of scores of their charges they hammer out quotas,first of all for the top school, in such a way as to equalize the scores of themarginal lowest-scoring pupil from each school. Then they do the same forthe second-best school, and so on down the line. Over the next weeks theyadvise their pupils and their pupils’ parents accordingly. An alternative is toallow initial tentative applications, then for each high school to publishstatistics of applicant numbers, thus allowing the weaker candidates to bewithdrawn from over-subscribed schools, before definitive applications aresent in. How this works in practice in a rural area with a relatively low rate ofprogression to university may be illustrated by the situation in Iwaki city inFukushima prefecture, which is the subject of Table 2.3. The details of thefollowing description relate to the mid–1980s, but there is no evidence thatthe general picture has subsequently changed, except that the passage of thesecond baby-boom—22 per cent fewer middle school pupils in 1994compared with the mid–1980s peak, has left some of the lowest-rankingschools short of pupils. The city constitutes a bigger-than-average catchmentarea, where the ranking of high schools is unambiguous. At what one mightcall Level 1, there is a single top public school for boys and one for girlswhich between them take about 17 per cent of the age group. (Some of thenorthern prefectures—unlike any in central and western Japan—still partiallyhold out against co-education.) These two schools owe their pre-eminenceto the fact that they were the only pre-war selective secondary schools ...