[Recommendations based on the study]

1. Abandon the national standard academic tests

Conducting a nation-wide census survey on academic performance using a single measure not only encourages ranking of schools based on the test scores but also distorts the educational purposes and the value of holistic evaluation, causing to damage students' human dignity.

While the national census survey is said to aim to better understand the students' development of academic competence, with no doubt in our minds, it will rather promote competitions and encourage schools to spend time on test preparations. To survey students' competence in a way that makes it possible to prepare for test-taking will only yield results that are temporal and superficial, as opposed to results that reflect more realities of students' everyday competence. Thus, after all, the national standard academic test fails to fulfill its mission, unable to capture the reality of how and what students have learned.

When the evaluation is judged based on test scores, the measure is so simplistic that it merely determines the ranking of each examinee. Also the test scores will be so privileged at school that everyone starts to pay attention only to them. If the teachers, parents, educational policies, and the society in general focus only or mostly on the test scores, it will change the nature of education from supporting children's holistic development and facilitating their social independence to education that aims to raise the test scores. Such education will encourage rote memories and technical trainings, pressing students to cram information, rather than to enhance students' abilities to think, analyze, and apply well-grounded knowledge and skills. In the end, we argue, such test-privileging education is more likely to damage the foundation of students' competence. Thus we believe that the national academic test will destroy our education. Children will lose hope in their diverse potentials; parents and other adults will become unable to celebrate purely the development of children; and an educational environment in which students can learn safely will be lost.

In sum, we argue that the national standard academic test is not only unable to accomplish its stated goal but also not educational at all. That we already know from the experiences of those who went through the national test 40 years ago. We must learn from our past. That is, it is us, the adults, who are now being tested our competence and literacy on history and education.

If the central government insists on implementing the national system of academic test, which we know cannot be a tool to understand the realities of students' learning and development, we cannot help inferring some other intentions hidden in the impetus. As some have warned, if the ranking based on test scores begins to have authorities in determining and controlling various aspects of educational activities, the quality of education will significantly be lowered.

2. Educate the public that the test scores shall only be a small part of evaluating academic performance

There are many competencies humans develop and the society requires its members to have that we cannot measure quantitatively. However, once we represent performance by numbers, those that cannot be measured quantitatively tend to be left invisible. We must first realize such a risk and use test scores as an evaluative measure of academic performance carefully with precautionary limitations.

It is almost impossible for a nation-wide standardized achievement test to accurately capture the realities of students' learning and development, since it can only measure knowledge and skills of narrow academic subjects and contents. Also the test is implemented within a limited time frame using a pre-selected set of questions, unable to evaluate the long-term development and achievements in diverse areas. At the best, it could only give us a rough assessment, such as "strong in calculation" or "weak in thinking abilities." That is, the national standardized academic test will have great difficulties with identifying the barriers for students' learning and places where they need help on. Thus, we cannot expect it to bring us educational benefits of offering us such useful information as how to modify curriculum or how to better support individual students' learning.

If we can develop a test that is capable of examining the quality of learning and of students' competencies, then we may be able to analyze and better understand what strategies may be effective in teaching, such as using the local nature or social environments of the community has promoted students' understanding, or that an effective teacher tends to use creative questioning skills in order to stimulate students' thinking. However, the currently proposed national academic test has not aimed to examine the quality and processes of teaching and learning.

It takes quite advanced knowledge both to design useful evaluative measures of academic competencies and to interpret the results in a way to inform us of the realities of students' learning and development. Unless we establish a team of specialists in these areas, we will not be able to fully utilize the results of assessment and tests.

Educational evaluation can be meaningful only when it is utilized to improve teaching practices and to inform other educational activities. If it happens long time after the educational activities have been completed, then the test will have no educational usage. Meanwhile, if we want to assess details of students' learning in a way that we can use the information to build educational activities, then the assessment will require as much time as the everyday teaching in classes do. Thus, we should think of educational assessment as a continuum of other educational activities such as everyday teaching in classes.

3. Demand an evaluation that assesses the quality of education policies via a method of random sampling

There are concerned voices about the public announcement of test results; however at this point the possibility has not been entirely denied. Some people rather believe that the test results should be made open to public so that the citizens can make informed decisions about which school to have their children attend.

We believe that the public announcement of test results, ranking the communities, schools, or classes, makes the inequalities in learning environments invisible, and will result in fueling the competition while it ignores other societal factors that may be beyond the control of teachers and schools. Such competition is unfair and does not lead to a true solution to educational problems.

We argue that making the test results public will reinforce discrimination and inequalities. We also argue that the enlarged discrepancies within communities, schools, and classes will make it difficult for students to live their lives with pride in their own communities, creating such societal problems as emigrations of human resources from less to more privileged areas. It will also damage the social relationships based on reciprocal trust and collaboration.

Educational policies argue that we need a tool to "assess the achievement level of students all around the country and to identify the insufficiencies or deficits that may be the causes of low achievements." We believe that a survey for such a purpose can be conducted via a method of random sampling (compared to the currently proposed system of census survey) and also this objective can be met by improving an existent survey on the local implementation of educational curriculum.

A nation-wide survey on students' academic achievements should be conducted, if to be done, with a clear purpose to measure the discrepancies among communities in regards to educational environments and conditions, as well as to evaluate the appropriateness of the national curriculum. Additionally, from the viewpoint of ensuring equal educational opportunities to all students, the survey results should be utilized to eliminate discrepancies and inequalities among communities or schools by providing more funds and assigning more skillful teachers and other staff for areas that have been shown to indicate lower students' achievements according to the survey.

Based on the analysis of PISA results, the OECD General Secretariat pointed out the linkage between "high level of academic achievements" and "social equalities of learning outcomes," offering an insight to the States' educational administrations. Yet, the Japanese educational administration has not reflected such a perspective.

4. Acknowledge that educational assessment should be conducted by individual teachers

It is unclear how high of the test scores should be considered "sufficient." Even if we decide such a cut-line, it will be without clear rationale or valid justification. Therefore, it is hard to use test scores as a credible accountability measure. As everyone knows, test scores themselves don't tell us much since one can easily obtain high or low test scores depending on the difficulty level of a given test. Then, an average of test scores may be used as an indicator of one's competence level, although the average by its nature inevitably identifies a half of "better" and a half of "worse" in its tested population. A system that necessitates for some students to be called failures cannot be educational.

As is often pointed out in a relation to the issue of unequal society, capitalism privileges the privileged and marginalizes the marginalized who are disempowered to demonstrate their abilities, forcing them to become failures. Education must support those marginalized children to fully develop their potentials and to demonstrate their diverse competencies. As such, we believe that the capitalism cannot be a principle for education.

Educational assessment should be brought back into classrooms where teachers work with children, because assessment should occur when teachers feel one is needed in order to facilitate students' new level of learning based on their knowledge about and observations of the students. When we observe individual children, we learn that learning happens in various conditions through various processes. So learning cannot be simplified into a manual, nor can the assessment. Educational activities of supporting individual children to develop their competencies will look different from classrooms to classrooms, and from schools to schools. Teachers are specialized in recognizing and responding to individual students' needs, which should be the basic tenet of all educational activities. The task of providing flexible and responsive support for individual students demand teachers to work in diverse ways. Thus, the quality and effectiveness of teachers' jobs should not be evaluated based on a single test score.

"Teachers' jobs" may be done when a teacher teaches assigned lessons during their working hours: However, a work of education is more than that. It is comprehensive and complex, refusing a simplified assessment of academic tests.

Midterm Report: PDF (Japanese)

Final Report: PDF (Japanese)

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