Accountability in Education and Recognition of Bullying: An Analysis of Municipality-Level Data in Tokyo

Bullying can be a major threat to students’ learning environment as well as their well-being. It is thus important for schools to recognize/identify bullying early, to prevent it from leading to dire consequences such as suicide in the extreme cases. This paper investigates the relevance of accountability in education in the recognition of school bullying. Specifically, we test a conjecture that when local education policymakers are held accountable for bullying at schools under their jurisdiction, they have a strong incentive to be proactive about identifying bullying, so that the recognized cases of bullying increase. To test this, we focus on revisions of law enacted in Japan in 2014, which strengthened accountabililty of local education policymakers. Expoiting the fact that this institutional reform was implemented in a staggered manner across municipalities, we show that consistent with the hypothesis, in municipalities in Tokyo where the reform had already been implemented, recognized cases of school bullying was higher than in other municipalities where the reform had not yet been conducted. The policy implication is that improving the accountability systems in education can promote recognition of bullying, thereby possibly preventing bullying from having catastrophic effects on students.