School quality and student learning: evidence from Japanese primary and lower secondary schools

This paper examines how school quality, measured by teachers' human capital, target setting, culture, tutoring, lesson plan, and outside classroom support, relates to student learning. Using panel data from Japan and exploiting within-student variation in exposure to school characteristics, the results show that these dimensions of school quality contribute to developing cognitive skills, especially of students initially in the lower end of the score distribution for Japanese, while the effects on math skills vary by students' learning level and dimensions of school quality. Moreover, the analysis of non-cognitive skills suggests that disciplinary culture likely increases self-control of primary school students.