Vouchers, Testing-Driven Education Reform on a Collision Course?
Conservative approaches to education reform may in the next few years encounter a fateful fork in the road. One long tradition of conservative educational theory has stressed the value of vouchers as a way of decentralizing education and providing state subsidies directly to parents (rather than routed through local school systems) for their children's education. A newer movement on the right has embraced standards-based accountability, where students and, increasingly, teachers will be evaluated according to the measures of certain standardized tests and complicated (and unproven) statistical models. At the moment, these twin strategies have been used to reorient radically local public school organizations. Louisiana has become ground zero for these twinned approaches, having recently approved a massive expansion of vouchers (HB976) and new reforms making teacher employment contingent upon student performance on standardized exams and opaque value-added modelling (HB974). However, there is an increasingly obvious tension between these two approaches. The voucher movement emphasizes pluralism; current "accountability" models