Is Yusuke Narita, Assistant Professor at Yale University, an expert on Japanese education?
Dr. Yusuke Narita wrote an explanatory article on the Internet about the use of educational data in Japan. Dr. Narita is a prominent researcher in Japan and an assistant professor at Yale University.
He claims to specialize in Education, Health & Labor Policies. On the other hand, while I think the content is generally correct, I have concerns about his expertise because he is wrong in some important ways or fails to mention some important elements that need to be explained.
This article is Narita’s commentary on the use of educational data of Japanese children, which the Japanese government is currently promoting.
In order to understand this, we need to understand the history and current state of education policy in Japan.
First of all, the premise is that educational data in Japan has not been officially developed until now. However, big tech companies such as Google for school, Microsoft, Apple, etc. have already entered the infrastructure, and in addition to educational ventures such as Recruit (a Japanese information vendor), LoiLo, and Atama Plus, many Japanese educational vendors known as “gakushu-juku” have entered the field of public education.
Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) has implemented a policy called the “GIGA School Initiative” starting in the fiscal year 2020, in which every elementary and junior high school student will be given a PC or tablet to learn with, which will allow them to keep a log of their learning, monitor their learning status, and provide feedback to schools and teachers on the status of their children.
”GIGA SchoolInitiative” means Global and Innovation Gateway for All, named by MEXT.
However, as I wrote, many education-related companies and Big Tech companies have already entered the Japanese public education scene. They are offering their services to Japanese elementary and junior high school students by getting them to agree to terms of service for their apps, but in return, they are already taking personal information.
This includes not only educational data such as learning logs, but also a great deal of personal information such as the location of the child’s area of residence, and areas of interest analogous to the words searched through the app.
This is a very important point. Was the agreement to acquire these items made by the child himself?
Or is it agreed upon by the parents? Did the school or the school board agree to it?
The problem with the use of educational data in Japan is that the Japanese government has not come up with a clear policy, and it is unclear who is going to manage these educational data.
There, Dr. Narita, who claims to be an education expert, is only talking about the importance of the children’s database in his article. It is also about child welfare, which is essentially different from educational data.
There is no doubt that educational data can be useful in advancing child welfare. The main reasons for a child’s plummeting grades are parental divorce or illness and worsening economic conditions, which may include parental abuse. A sudden drop in grades or a change in attitude can be a signal about the child and the family.
However, the purpose of educational data acquisition is not limited to child welfare.
As stated in the OECD guidelines, since the purpose of acquiring educational data is to improve the education of children, local governments (municipalities) and boards of education should not use the data for any other purpose. Furthermore, the child welfare program that some local governments in Japan are already promoting is based on a system of listening to and scoring children’s moods at school, and careful discussion is needed on how to score and monitor information about children’s inner life without permission.
There has certainly been criticism in some parts of Japanese society about the possibility of the Japanese government managing all this information. Dr. Narita must have written this article as a response to this argument.
And then, Japan’s educational administration has a history of becoming such. Dr. Narita is explaining educational administration without mentioning this important context, which I think is a problem.
First, Japan went to war with the U.S., lost the war, and was occupied by the U.S. SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers) ruled Japan in 1945. In the process of dismantling Japan’s militaristic education system, the American system of school boards was introduced.
When Japan regained its independence, the Cold War broke out between the United States and the Soviet Union, and in the 1960s leftist activities against the alliance between Japan and the United States flourished in Japan. The Japanese communists, who were at the center of this movement, took over the field of education (the Nikkyouso issue), and for a long time the Japanese Ministry of Education had to fight an institutional battle against the communists in the field of education.
It is ironic that the U.S. introduced the Board of Education to Japan and it became a bastion of communists in Japan. As a result, the policy of keeping children’s information out of the school system was thoroughly enforced, resulting in a strong opposition to the Japanese government’s centralized control of children’s information.
It should be pointed out that Dr. Narita’s argument talks about the pros and cons of the children’s database without mentioning these important historical events, which makes me doubt his expertise in educational administration and policies.
As for the centralized management of education data, in the UK, for example, the government manages the education data of all children. Whether or not education in the UK is a good system, there is nothing surprising about the government managing it if there is no system of school boards.
Furthermore, Dr. Narita writes that data on children is distributed among several administrative departments in the government, so it would be better to standardize the data and make it easier to use. From the perspective of child welfare alone, I think this is correct.
However, there are two problems. One, does he really think it is right to mix children’s education data with information on family tax payments, suspected divorce, etc.? This is just the field of child welfare, not the issue of using educational data. Using inappropriate data to score children’s performance, inner life, and the families they grow up in is a problem. It should be considered in isolation.
The other thing is that before we can even discuss cross-sectional use of educational data, Big Tech companies and the education industry have already entered the public education system in Japan. It’s not even a question of standardization. The problem is that there is no way for the Ministry of Education (MEXT), local governments, schools, children themselves or their families to know who is the controller of personal information and what kind of analysis is being done by these companies.
In general, Dr. Narita’s story is almost the same as what the Digital Agency in Japanese Government, which promotes the use of educational data, is arguing for. There are many parts of the argument that I agree with. On the other hand, Dr. Narita does not seem to understand why this problem is occurring in education administration as an expert at all. I have my doubts about his expertise, but I hope that he will continue the discussion in an appropriate manner.
