ABSTRACT
In the mid-1990s, both the United States and Japan fundamentally restructured their education systems. Three global trends in policymaking conditions facilitated this simultaneous structural education reform: (1) worries that failing public schools threatened economic competitiveness, (2) the emergence of trendy New Public Management solutions that promised to fix schools by simply restructuring authority, and (3) more chaotic and competitive politics driven by the decline of labor unions.
