hard to know, of course, but it is relatively easy to distinguish among the potential size and significance of the current initiatives being proposed, developed and evaluated. Simply ask the question of how big a change we could expect on what dimensions of national level performance, and provide an answer simply in terms of order of magnitude, risk, timeliness, and complexity. That could sort a great deal out. The second key question focuses on the potential for scaling any of the innovative ideas to a significance within a reasonable time once it has been tested and developed. And it is here that our attention turns not to the supply side of the system – not the world of individual producers and their methods, purposes, and audiences, but to the world of demanders – most importantly third party payers and regulators who act as the arbiters of educational value. Critical to the Schumpeter model is the role of consumers as arbiters of value and financial supporters of producing enterprises. But, as noted above, in the educational world the big financier, and the big arbiter of value is government. This suggests that no idea – regardless of where it was developed and tested – has a chance to scale unless government decides it wants to not only allow it, but also demand it. Government demand is organized around public purposes, and constrained by politics including supplier interests and concepts of the public good and justice expressed in the political system. It is expressed through both public funding and through regulations that decide what sorts of activities count as education for the purposes of the regulatory system that requires all individuals to be educated, and for purposes of financing particular educational activities with public dollars. This is the big buyer/demander in the system, and its choices drive much of what gets produced and who produces it. If the demand side is hostile to innovation, or unable to distinguish improved educational performance (at the individual and social level) then a government dominated system cannot learn to improve its performance. The government has to remain not only open to, but actively encouraging of innovation. It also has to be reliable in its ability to recognize value at both individual and social levels and to distinguish value creating ideas from fads. But it also cannot afford to be hamstrung by methods of empirical investigation and evaluation that are limited in terms of the kinds of innovations that can be scientifically evaluated in a short period of time.

### Different Models of National Level Social Production Systems Encouraging Innovation in Mixed Systems

The simple, abstract model of a national education learning system described above can be complemented as a device for fueling thought by some more concrete images of concrete institutional structures and processes by presenting some more or less familiar examples of complex social production systems that have been built and used to promote social learning. (Moore,

######## Federalism as the Laboratory of Democracy

One important institutional idea is the idea that a federal government structure can be seen as an arrangement in which different states within a given polity could become laboratories for alternative ways of defining and advancing social goals in particular domains. This is closely analogous to the idea that both cross national, and historical experience could also be used to help those working on national