Comparative Analysis for Public School Finance and Accounts

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School-level autonomy is main stream of recent educational reforms in Japan and USA. We conducted a questionnaire survey on city level 698 boards of education in 2002, respondents were 576. About thirty five percents of respondents have some policies to give principals authority to make decisions related to spending money which were funded specially. According to the survey, in 339 cities, principals are authorized to spend money allocated by central office ; however in most case an upper limit is set. We found that almost 200,000 yen for purchasing supplies at a time and also 200,000 yen for contracting with any company to repair facilities. Applying the logistics regression analysis, we choose five factors as a explanatory variations; principals' authority, to make payment, an existence of city wide balance sheet, discretionary funds, codes of public school financial accounting, number of junior high and the financial capability index. We can say that the city, which have discretionary fund for schools, which have code of public school financial accounting, and which have a large number of schools, tends to give principals some authority. On the other hand, considering the great difference between Japanese public school accounting system and United States, we translated a "Financial Accounting for Local and State School Systems (2003 edition) published by National Center for Education Statistics in U.S. Department of Education, and then compared both types of accounting system. We pointed out that the establishing of accounting system by objective or by activities such as U.S. is needed in Japanese public school systems.