Can State Standards & Market-Based Reforms Be Reconciled?
Can they work together? Can a hybrid system succeed? We have promising evidence from charter schools, which must contend with both forms of accountability at the same time and which generally find it possible to balance them. Both standards-based and market-style reforms come from outside the system but they follow different theories and many people believe they are incompatible. After all, standards-based reform—typified by statewide academic standards, tests and rewards/sanctions a la President Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation—is top-down, driven by elites that tell schools what results to achieve and reward and punish them. Market-style reform—vouchers, charters, privately operated public schools, home-schooling, “virtual” schooling, etc.—is populist and bottom-up, relying on the preferences of clients to signal to schools what must be done and on the individual actions of schools and educators to satisfy those clients. In today’s education policy tussles, each has many fans
