MEXT also allocates some funding to prefectural and municipal authorities for schools. Prefectures play a significant role in resource and personnel management. Municipalities are responsible for the supervision and day-to-day operation of schools.
NCEE | Japan: Teacher and Principal Quality
At the prefectural level, there is a board of education comprised of five governor-appointed members; this board is responsible for appointing teachers to primary and lower secondary schools, funding municipalities, appointing the superintendent of education at the prefectural level and operating upper secondary schools.
Within municipalities there are boards of education appointed by the mayor. These boards are responsible for making recommendations on teacher appointments to the prefectural board of education, choosing textbooks from the MEXT-approved list, conducting in-service teacher and staff professional development and overseeing the day-to-day operations of primary and lower secondary schools.
In the schools, principals are the school leaders, and determine the school schedule, manage the teachers and take on other management roles as needed. Teachers are responsible for determining how to teach the curriculum and for creating lesson plans, as well as being in contact with parents. Public schools are funded by a combination of support from the national, municipal and prefectural governments.
Public primary and lower secondary schools do not charge tuition, and government tuition support makes public upper secondary school essentially free for families making below an annual income threshold. Families earning above this threshold pay tuition at the upper secondary level. Other forms of funding are capital grants, which go to private schools for specific costs, including new buildings and equipment.
English-language education in Japan
While private schools are considered to be more competitive and prestigious than public schools, public schools still account for the vast majority of primary and lower secondary schools. Private schools are a significant part of upper secondary schools, with about one in four upper secondary schools classified as private. Schools are functional but unadorned, and most schools have a very small administrative staff, with only a principal, an assistant principal, a janitor and a nurse.
The focus of the funding is on teachers and students. Although English is a compulsory subject in junior high and high school in this country, Japanese still have a hard time achieving even daily conversation levels. The top three are the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden, which are all northern European nations.
Japan Student Services Organization （JASSO）
Japan places between Russia and Uruguay. Even though most Japanese learn English for at least six years in school, why are we still not reaching sufficient proficiency? This of course is not a new question. It has been asked for years and there is a bank of standard answers. Usually, the poor achievement is blamed on the way English is taught in schools.
It is said that there is too much classroom emphasis on grammar with very little time devoted to actual conversational practice. The emphasis is mainly on the silent skills of reading and writing. Listening is rather passive as opposed to being an active part of a conversation.
The focus is on accuracy and avoiding grammatical mistakes.
Students spend a great deal of time copying out what was written on the blackboard and memorizing it in preparation for tests. They often describe English lessons as boring. The teachers themselves — most of whom were taught in the same way as they now teach — do not have adequate enough English communication skills.
TOKYO (5 a.m.)
Plus, they are too afraid of making mistakes and feel they must speak perfect English. In a sense they impose silence on themselves.
- Expectations for Japanese Children.
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No doubt there is some truth in all of the above. But are these the only reasons or are there other factors to be taken into consideration? The data shows how many hours of study are required on average for English-speaking State Department officials, who must be well-educated and highly-qualified people, to be able to achieve the daily conversational level in any particular language. The result differed among four groups of languages as follows: Group 1, including French, Spanish and German, required hours; Group 2, including Greek, Hindi and Indonesian, required hours; Group 3, including Russian, Hebrew and Turkish, required 1, hours; and Group 4, including Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Arabic, required 2, to 2, hours.
In fact, out of the 62 languages examined, Japanese was listed as the most difficult language to learn.
- MEXT : STUDY in JAPAN.
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A similar result was found in research carried out by Dr. Donald Arthur Norman at the University of California, San Diego on the number of hours needed for native English speakers to become fluent in a second language.