Education minister decides to end controversial academic achievement test
Education Minister Kawabata Tatsuo on October 9 announced that from 2010, the ministry will stop giving a nationwide academic achievement test (AT) to all 12-year-old and 15-year-old children.
He said, gIn order to achieve our goal of improving studentfs academic ability as equally as possible, a sample test for randomly-selected schools will be sufficient,h and indicated that the ministry will replace the existing AT with a test for randomly-selected schools.
The test in question started in 2007 at a cost of about 6 billion yen a year. It has led to an intensification of competition among not only children but local governments and schools as well.
At various elementary and junior high schools across the nation, teachers spend a lot of time dealing with test questions to prepare students for the AT, and have to reduce teaching time for other subjects.
Carrying out the controversial AT has distorted the role of education, accelerated competition, and increased stress on teachers.
Moreover, regarding whether the test result should be published or not, many municipalities and schools face differences of opinion almost every year. Experts point out that the present AT system is useless in building up childrenfs academic abilities because they receive their test result several months later and thus cannot quickly respond to the mistakes they made in the exam.
The Japanese Communist Party has criticized the AT for creating undue competition in education and called for the cancellation of such an across-the-board test.
- Akahata, October 10, 2009