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Vouchers for Teacher Education (Non)Reform in Mongolia: Transitional, Postsocialist, or Antisocialist Explanations?

In 1998, the Ministry of Science, Technology, Education, and Culture (MOSTEC) of Mongolia introduced vouchers for its in-service training of teachers. The initiative was publicly announced as a fundamental reform that would replace the Soviet-based system of training and herald a new age of democracy, free-market economy, personal freedom, and individual rights. MOSTEC claimed it would promote “lifelong learning,” “decentralize” the system, break the “state monopoly,” cater to the “individual needs” of teachers, advance “choice” among teachers, and “enhance the quality” of teacher training by permitting “competition” from other training institutions. The reform further sought to demonstrate that Mongolia was not falling behind “international standards” in educational reform. As with educational reforms worldwide, large rifts yawned between what was initially announced in public, subsequently enacted on paper, and eventually implemented in practice. In practice, the vouchers have ultimately been used as (unevenly distributed) registration forms. Contrary to what was initially announced, there has been no sign of a supply and demand–driven training reform. It is hardly news that a reform may play out differently at the levels of “policy talk,” policy enactment, and implementation. But the policy analysis presented here seeks to go beyond mere description of these apparent differences by revealing the meanings and expectations that various actors attached to the reform. The study of voucher-based teacher education reform is especially intriguing because it is a case of an imported concept (public choice) that was subsequently locally adapted or “Mongolized.” Why was the original voucher idea, one that had been celebrated in public, diluted when it came to policy action? And why did it eventually evaporate once it was implemented? The simplest explanation for these kinds