In the U.S, the school districts have been the core of public school governance historically. However, states and mayors are beginning to control over schools directly. This research focused on this tendency by way of case studies. As a result, we could find the followings. Not only state and/or mayoral takeovers of some large cities are required to radical reexamination of the school board system, but also they suggest new form of school governance in large school districts

This report consists of the following compositions. The first are meanings, purposes and the process of this research. The second is the role of local school boards in the process of education policy. The third are the trends and challenges of U.S. local educational governance. The fourth are the transformation of U.S. educational governance and the problems educational administration research face. And the fifth are mayoral leadership and involvement in education. In the first section, the author described the outline of the meaning of this research, the purpose and research cost. The second and the third sections made reference about the realities and problems of U.S. local school boards, including the way, influences and the criticism of mayoral takeover, and the author suggested the possibilities of reorganization of American educational system which have been characterized as the federal-state-local trilaminar structure. While we engage in an active debate about the reorganization of school boards in Japan, noted above discussion may cast a stir into that discussion. And the discussion might give a serious suggestion to educational administration research. In the fourth section, as the mayoral takeover is almost always accompanying privatization of the public school, I suggested the influences of research about the promotion of privatization and school choice policy. In the end, this report includes Japanese translation version of the document published by the United States Conferences of Mayors, which have the theoretical rationale for the mayoral takeover. Within this document, the mayors of the individual city are discussing the basis of promotion of mayoral takeover in the column. On the whole, this document are illustrating the significance of promoting this policy based on the understandings of the merit and demerit

The Field research has been taken place both in Japan and in abroad (UK, China etc.) as to the general trend of schools provided by Joint stock companies in the period of this research. Such newly launched schools in Japan have been the result of deregulation policy in these few years proposed by the central government, and it is very much important to collect the exact information about them as much as possible.In UK, schools organized by such companies have not the board of governors which is usual to be set in ordinary school and is responsible to the management of each school. On the contrary, the head quarter of the company are likely to provide and makes close communication with its school constantly to keep reliable understandings.In Chinese school the headmaster is very much responsible to the school management and positively to give the latest and exact information of school to the board of governors. At the same time the head of the board seems to be very keen to the business efficiency and the performance of his school. Such close partnership brings the good result of this school in these few years.One of the Schools provided by the joint stock company (Asahijuku, Okayama) seems to be in very good circumstance apart from the huge debt, ant the head of board of managers is going to seek the good school performance as well as the financial result regularly. He has developed unique curriculum and teachers salary spiral according to the result of teachers evaluation system.As a result of this research, it is quite sure that the quality of such schools depend on the idea and the attitude of the managers of the company itself and not on the sort of organization, for example board of school or corporate body

This research project based on the empirical researches has aimed at comparing the school reforms in Japan with those in the United States of America. As the hypothesis of our research, we set up three types of them. The first one is participatory reform with internal responsibility, and the second is market- oriented reform with external responsibility/accountability. In conclusion, we clarified that the mainstream of the Japan's reforms since 1990s would belong to the third type which is participatory reform with accountability. To speak about it concretely, we enacted to set up a school councilor (Gakko-Hyogiin) in 2001 who might advise a principal on school management, and then we established school management council (Gakko-Unei-Kyogikai) in 2004 which should make an advisory and/or governing function.We have described a landscape of the school reforms in the United States. The Chicago school reform may be regarded as the first type of school reform, and educational voucher and charter school are two of the second one. By the way, it is interesting to us that the Chicago reform has been transformed the first type into the third one. We also find out the importance of social capital, especially of trust inside its reform. As for educational voucher, we have researched the Cleveland case, and reconsidered both the separation of church and state and the inequality of schooling. Finally, we have published two reports as our results : the interim report published in 2004 and the final one in 2005

The study shows two features of dropouts in the structures of the consciousness and elaborates the problems of future study.The first finding is that the features of consciousness of dropouts are not only negative and passive to their schools, but are correlated to self-esteem which supports radically their attitudes. Most of dropouts tend to have strong self-assertion and have low motive to participate in school activities in addition to these, they don't prepare adequate continuous efforts and clear sense of purpose to learn which are needed as a premise in schoollife.We confirm that these features become causes of staying in the same grade and most of dropouts leave school at the end of school year.The second finding is that dropouts have the characteristics in their relations to friends and future lives, which are different from generally accepted dropout-images. These characteristics change previous images that students who are passive and quiet in school tend to dropouts. Most of dropouts tend to insist on their opinions and recognize themselves to be positive to activities which are done out of school and to have many friends.As schools are short of culture and climate for acceptance of the students who have consciousness, they tend to dropouts. The schools should consider their own education as relative.It is no exaggeration to say that we extract a new image of dropout from our survey, but it is doubtful how general our image is. We might solve some part of this problem by means of minute surveys, but have to re-consider how exactly we could differentiate potential dropouts from other students. Particularly in order to analyze how their features of consciousnesses were determined by environments, we need to grasp their actual conditions of schoollife