A case study of how education labour markets are organized in Japan: mandatory teacher rotation in Japanese public schools

How teacher rotation in Japanese high schools affects the clustering of teacher quality: Comparing the distribution of teachers across public and private education sectors

“…This threshold is based on evidence of when teachers begin to become more effective (Clotfelter et al, 2010;Hanushek et al, 2005;Klitgaard & Hall, 1975;Murnane & Phillips, 1981). This three-year demarcation also fits with qualitative examinations of teacher rotation systems in Japan as an important cutoff (Fukuya, 2015;Seebruck, 2019). Teachers amidst their first, second, or third year of teaching were coded as 1; those amidst their fourth year of teaching or beyond were coded as 0.…”

“…First, this study examines only high schools. This reduces generalizability, as there are qualitative differences between education levels when it comes to how jinji idou operates-such as the geographic range of teacher transfers, which spans the entire prefecture for high schools but are limited to smaller geographical municipalities in elementary and middle schools (Seebruck, 2019). Moreover, unlike high schools in Japan, which are very much tiered academically by student capability, this is less of an issue at elementary and middle schools, where students do not have to pass entrance examinations to gain enrollment (Kariya, 2011;Ono, 2001;Rohlen, 1983).…”

“…Second, one way to capture unobserved traits such as teacher quality is to capture them with another concept-in this case, full-time teacher status. This is particularly true in the Japanese prefecture studied here where becoming a full-time teacher requires passing a test and an interview for a limited number of slots (Seebruck, 2019). The thought is that the administrators know a great deal about the teachers they hire and make hiring decisions based on their judgments of those teachers.…”

“…Simply put, experienced teachers are more knowledgeable about curriculum, instruction, and assessment (Prince, 2002). In Japan, years of experience factors into teacher development (MEXT, 2016) and rotation decisions (Seebruck, 2019) and correlates with teacher salaries (Okano & Tsuchiya, 1999).…”

“…2 Within Japan's 47 prefectures, the prefecture studied here ranks in the top fifteen in land area, population, and population density, and the high school education system comprises over 100,000 students and nearly 7,000 full-time teachers (Statistics Japan, 2013). There are a variety of formal and informal policies governing systematic rotation of public school teachers in this prefecture (for details on teacher rotation in this prefecture, see Seebruck, 2019), but what is important to this paper is that private school teachers have autonomy over where they work whereas public school teachers' career paths are decided by the prefectural board of education.…”