One emphasizes the virtues of finding some means of centralizing the process of stimulating, supporting and diffusing innovations. This has the virtues of: 1) protecting a national evaluation perspective; 2) taking advantage of collating information from many different initiatives and experiments for collective review, discussion and planning; and 3) being able to use powerful levers associated with money, regulatory authority, and professional knowledge and legitimacy to move the existing system. The other emphasizes the virtues of a bottom up, economically motivated and guided effort to create test and diffuse innovations in response to consumer demand (with more or less government subsidy, and more or less government controls over how the money will be spent by the consumer beneficiaries). The first seems lie a solid technocratic approach. It defines national objectives, assesses current performance against individual level educational impact and the wider social goals of the national educational system, seeks to find or develop improved methods for accomplishing the goals in some systematic way, tests those ideas, and once they are proven to work, supports the diffusion of the new (and perhaps the liquidation of the old). This system seeks to use the power of explicit practical reasoning and the methods of science to find the path forward to improvement. It imagines that both existing knowledge, and the capacity to increase knowledge lies at the national or central level of society, and that the knowledge based approach can and should guide the search for improved performance. Skeptics worry that this system does not search widely enough, avoids some of the most apparently intractable but socially most important parts of the system, and moves too slowly and too partially to create momentum in increasing the overall productivity of the educational system with respect to national goals. Cynics worry that this system will suffer from the problems described above even when it is working well, and that the most likely result of such a system will make the system vulnerable to capture by existing educational suppliers, and freeze the performance of the system at current levels. In contrast, the second seems like a dynamic market approach – one that can deliver more power and influence to the consumers of educational services, and through that change, motivate educational suppliers to innovate and create variation in educational products, services, and production processes. That variation, in turn, holds the potential for improved performance at both individual and social levels. The improved performance can be sorted out quickly simply by observing what products, services and production processes individual consumers prefer, and the expression of those preferences, tied to financial payments to producers, in competitive markets of suppliers will not only naturally allow the valued suppliers to grow, but also shrink the capacity of less efficient and effective suppliers to claim assets. The system for generating, testing, and increasing the market share of educational services that do well in meeting individual consumer demand is fast and powerful in producing changes in the national educational system. Skeptics worry that the dependence of this decentralized system will not give adequate focus to social level objectives for the educational system. The primary concern is that an educational system run on these principals will increase rather than reduce inequalities in educational outcomes as initial social inequality in social position enable those who are better endowed materially, socially, and politically to