services would be determined by the individual consumers of the services on one hand, and on the strategic decisions of profit motivated suppliers to provide quality now, and to experiment and innovate with new educational services and methods of supplying them in their competitive markets. Let’s call this “pure privatization” since it essentially privatizes the entire supply and demand of educational production and consumption in both the short and long term. Significantly, no country has chosen this option. In all countries, the government has remained involved in financing, regulating, or directly managing educational services. And it has maintained a significant role in trying to evaluate the overall performance of the sector in terms of aggregate results that include more than the satisfaction of the individual consumers who bought the educational services. That should give us some reason to be concerned about the value of the Schumpter model right from the start.

######## Marketization

A second idea associated with privatization was something that could more properly be called “marketization” of educational services. This conception kept the government importantly engaged in shaping the national system of educational production and consumption, but altered the way in which the government participated. In marketization the educational production system, the government retained a commitment to finance educational services (presumably to ensure the “right” level and distribution of educational production and consumption), but it gave up its dominant, nearly monopolistic, position as the supplier of educational services. The stream of government dollars available for purchasing educational services would be distributed across government, voluntary sector, and commercial suppliers of educational services. The hope was that “marketization” of the supply of educational services would break up the grip of “the one best system” for producing educational results. That, in turn, would provide (at public expense!) options for individuals with different ideas about the ends and means of the educational systems, increasing the capacity of the system to respond to the individual consumer demands. This would also create a great deal of natural variation in educational production processes that could be used to test whether some methods worked better either for some individual goals. To the degree that the system as a whole began to respond more efficiently to heterogeneous individual consumer demand, we could reasonably assume that the system was improving in terms of its ability to meet individual demands. But to the degree that consumer demand had some homogeneous elements (and aligned fairly closely with the values that the wider public wanted to see produced by and reflected in the operations of the system as a whole), then the variation in the educational production processes generated by marketization might also produce superior methods not only to meet niche demands, but also to improve generally across many different niches – creating aggregate productivity gains for all as well as for greater responsiveness to individual demand. An important feature of the more common “marketization” policy initiatives (as distinct from “pure privatizations” initiatives) was that they left some residual power to define society wide educational objectives at the social, governmental level as well as at the level of individual consumer demand. The public as a whole would retain the practical power to arbiter the individual level impact, and ultimate social value being produced with the use of public educational dollars, and state regulatory authority. To the degree that the government used its regulatory authority on the demand side to require that children be educated, and on the supply side to define what constituted an educational experience that would qualify to meet this requirement, it could continue to influence who used