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When people talk about the elegant Japanese accountability system, proceed with caution.

by Susan Ohanian


In Needed: Fresh Thinking on Teacher Accountability, James Stigler revives an old argument for what he calls "Japanese lesson study":



[T]eachers teaching the same content (for instance, all the 4th grade teachers in a school) meet together to develop monthly exams based on their own curricular goals. (Japan has a national curriculum, so all teachers teach the same topics at roughly the same time.) All teachers administer the common exam, and then meet as a group to score the exams and examine the performance of students in each classroom.

These are not standardized tests, and they are not national. Because the teachers themselves construct common exams, they see them as fair and valid assessments of learning outcomes. The comparisons across classrooms are also perceived as fair. Classes in Japan are larger than in the United States, and students are assigned randomly, so there is no reason to expect differences in learning across classrooms unless they are the result of something the teachers are doing differently from one another. As teachers jointly examine their classroom averages, they look at the variability across classes and discuss what might explain greater-than-expected differences. They might wonder, for example, why so many students in one teacher's class failed to find common denominators before adding fractions, whereas most students in the other classes did not make that error.




Stigler says "These are not standardized tests and they are not national." Take that with a grain of salt. Even Japanese educators worry about how standardized the lessons are. American visitors to Japanese classrooms are often surprised to see one teacher in charge of 40 students.

When I visited Japan and asked why teachers didn't agitate for smaller classes, I was told that forty is the "ideal" number for instruction. "A small class size cannot promote the good relationships that will be expected of students in society," a principal asserted. His tone convinced me that Confucius must have left a tablet of ideal numbers for school administrators. But later I learned that the ever-pragmatic Japanese go to a variety of sources to obtain their sacred numbers. I asked about faculty meetings and was told each school has fifteen faculty representatives who meet to discuss curriculum and other matters (Andrew Carnegie having established that fifteen is the ideal number for productive meetings).

As it happens, I've sat in on a number of classrooms in Japan--from mathematics to still life painting. I hope that Notes on Japan from an American Schoolteacher might be illuminating. After describing very specific lessons, I reached this conclusion:



Numerous American observers have claimed that the Japanese do so well because they leave nothing to chance. But nobody explains how a chance-free system could be transplanted to America. Nobody asks teachers why they might prefer philosopher/educator David Hawkins' image of good teaching. Hawkins tells us that the good teacher must be ready for the unexpected appearance of the bird in the window. I will concede that the American willingness to "go with" the serendipitous and the novel is our weakness. We often wander off track, follow frivolous fads, and forget to keep in touch with a central core. But our flexibility, our willingness to try new things, to let children explore on their own, is also our very real strength. And it cannot be handed out by a ministry of education.

World traveler and social commentator Paul Theroux cautions that things can be too orderly. He is troubled by the sight of a mob of people waiting on a sidewalk in Osaka for the light to change. "A society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists." American educators should stop and ponder what an elementary school classroom without divergent thinkers, without nails sticking out in all directions, might indicate. Japan is a wonderful place to visit, but would we really want to go to school there?




When people talk about the "elegant Japanese accountability system," proceed with caution.

— Susan Ohanian
website
2010-06-15


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