School-based Management and School Budgeting in Public Senior High Schools

The purpose of this paper is to investigate to what extent Prefectural Boards of Education have delegated authority or power to their jurisdictional public senior high schools in order to secure the independence and the autonomy of their public schools since the 1995 report of the Central Education Council. A questionnaire regarding school-based management was administered to 47 superintendents of Prefectural Boards of Education. Data from the questionnaire provides interesting results. First, senior high schools tend to independently and positively cope with their school tasks now faced by them by establishing their clear school visions. Second, prefectural superintendents mostly perceive that the schools' discretion when doing curriculum-making has been enlarged. Though the discretionary authority of the schools (and the school principals), in such area as curriculum-making seems to be expanding gradually, the school authority of personnel matters and school budgeting has not been delegated enough from the Prefectural Board of Education. Third, in order to expand schools' discretionary authorities in terms of the school budgeting and its execution, it is necessary to promote more flexible use of the school budget and the establishment of a school principal's discretionary budget. As these findings are the result of analyzing the opinion polls conducted among prefectural superintendents, a careful examination of how a series of educational reforms toward establishing the independence and the autonomy of public schools have been carried out must be done on the part of the school site