principals; or 2) a wider exploration of methods that might be valuable not only within particular niches in the system, but also for the overall or median conditions on the system. This observation sets out the what often seems to be a fundamental tension between the idea of ensuring excellent performance in the short run through strict forms of accountability for performance on one hand, and ensuring even more excellent performance in the future through institutional structures and processes that not only tolerate, but encourage departures from existing practices in the expectation that we can find better ways of performing in the future. The trick seems to be to set up some kind of system that can be highly disciplined not only for performance in the short run (relying heavily on existing practices), but also highly disciplined in the search for and exploitation of improved methods of teaching in classrooms, running schools, and organizing national level systems for financing, producing, and evaluating national school systems. We need not only disciplined performance, but disciplined learning to improve performance. (Pritchett, 2015)

## Two Big Ideas About Creating System Wide Learning

A useful way to start thinking about the practical challenging of developing a national educational system that can learn to improve its performance (with a little help from RISE!) is to reflect on two quite distinct ideas about the institutions and processes that could cause a large, multi-sector social production system to improve its performance through a process that encourages wide-spread innovation, fast learning, and the rapid diffusion of the better ideas across the national production system. One will describe as the “government supported, centralized research and development model.” The other we will describe as the “consumer dominated market model.” Each of these has its strengths, and each its weaknesses. Each has its fervent supporters and each its critics. The aim in this paper is to help us imagine a combined approach that would allow us to take advantage of the strengths and avoid the weaknesses of each approach. The method is to describe the key features of the two systems, the critiques of the two systems, followed by a modest effort to think through both the principles and the concrete structures and processes we should use to build a national education system that can learn not only how to perform better, but also to understand better than they now do what they mean by a better, more just system.

### The Government-Structured, Centralized Research and Development Model (GSCRD)

On one hand, we have the model of a more or less centrally guided process that:

- 1) is in a good position to define what progress and improved performance would mean for the system as a whole;
- 2) has gathered and continues to gather accurate information about the macro performance of the sector in these terms;
- 3) provides financial support and social authorization for potentially valuable innovations in educational practices, and has developed a central system for gathering accurate information about the myriad of innovations being undertaken with or without central financing or approval, and enabled the development of reliable empirical evidence about the degree to which those innovations “worked” to achieve their desired results;