educational services, and what the services were. To the degree that government money flowed to voluntary and commercial sector educational producers through grants and contracts, public values judged to be important to the public at large could be advanced through more or less restrictive conditions places on the use of the public dollars provided. Through these means, government, acting as an agent of the public, would remain a potentially important arbiter of the value being produced by the system at both individual and aggregate levels. As the arbiter of the social value that the educational system was generating through its impact on particular individuals, and the way that those individual level effects accumulated over time and across individuals to create particular aggregate economic, social, and political conditions in the society, government could shape the system to achieve public goals such as promoting economic opportunity, and upward mobility not only in economic, but also in social and political terms. By enabling upward mobility across these different spheres, it could advance important equity goals, and strengthen the society as a whole as well as satisfy the current individual consumers of the educational system. Of course, because the different educational suppliers that showed up and gained market share in the marketized (as opposed to the purely public system) were to some degree structurally and financially independent of the most direct forms of government control, the degree to which the government’s goals could be reliably reflected in their operations was less than was possible through a system that consisted entirely of public agency providers. The providers remained private organizations. Therefore, they could decide whether to stay in the business, accepting politically authorized government regulation and the terms set on government grants and contracts, or eschew the money and operate at the limits of the government’s tolerance of what constituted an appropriate education. Considerable difficulties and tensions arise in such systems due to struggles over how the private educators produce educational services, to whom they provide their services, and how much financial support the government will supply through direct grants and contracts or tax breaks of various kinds. But it seems likely that a marketization system will remain responsive to the public demand for educational services expressed in regulation and terms placed on the use of government dollars to a greater degree than the pure privatization system. At the same time, it will probably produce more variation in educational products, services and production processes than a government monopoly, but less than would characterize a pure market system.

######## Individualization

The third idea of privatization – the one that became the most widely encouraged challenge to the pure public system is what could be called the “individualization” of what remained a publicly financed educational system. The key feature of this system is that the public continued to pay for the costs of educational production, but it gave individual educational consumers the choice to decide which educational supplier they would rely on. In many ways this looked like pure privatization in that consumer choice – and the individual arbitration of the value provided by the educational system – would be handed back to individuals and taken away from much influence by the society as a whole acting through government the use of government regulatory authority and tax dollars. But this is not exactly the right interpretation of this system for two key reasons.