<Article>The Situation of School Autonomy in Administration of Compulsory Education: International Comparison between Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States

This paper considers the decentralization of authority from the central/local government and school. Paying attention to "school effectiveness" for better school governance and management, this paper re-examines the logic under the propagation of School-based Management (SBM). SBM is based on the belief that highly autonomous school creates better school management; and that better school management produces better outcomes. In order to investigate the belief mentioned above, this study compares SBM and performance between three countries: Japan, the United Kingdom(UK), and the United States(US) using an international student assessment. This study creates school autonomy index that explains what discretion has been given to public schools in compulsory education and applies multilevel analyses. The purpose of this study is to examine the implications of schools being "autonomous" among the three countries. The significance of this paper is to investigate an optimal situation of the shared responsibility between schools and administrative bodies in education. Among the three countries, the common feature is that the role of the central education administration: they monitor and supervise the execution of educational activities by local authorities and schools. Compared to Japan, the United States and the United Kingdom show diverse patterns on shared responsibility among stakeholders, due to various school types in the UK, and discretion of school district in the US. School autonomy in the US and the UK are relatively high in teacher deployment, school finance and curriculum. Japanese schools tend to give more power to the head teacher only, and we need to re-consider this system whether it is relevant for "autonomous" school management