- 4) has the means for encouraging the fast, widespread adoption of the methods that seem to “work” to produce valuable educational results in specific domains;
- 5) and can speed the adoption of good methods in both absolute and relative terms by having the capacity to divert resources from processes that are cost-ineffective to those that are more cost-effective.

######## Embracing a Social Point of View: Valuing Both Individual and System Level Outcomes

Note that I describe this as a more or less centrally guided process primarily because the model seems to assume the existence of at least a perspective within a society, perhaps a particular institution, that embraces a national definition of a high performing educational system taken as a whole, and evaluates the performance of the whole system from this particular perspective. By definition, that perspective can see and evaluate the impact of the system from two different points of view. On one hand, it can view the performance of the system from the point of view of the principal individual beneficiaries of the system (students and their parents). It can ask and answer the question of whether the educational system is delivering the educational services to students and parents that they want, that they believe they need and deserve, and that will produce the short and long term results they value. On the other, the national perspective can also embrace the wider evaluative frame that includes social and public aims that are not fully captured by the individual satisfactions and benefits delivered to individual students and their families. For example, to the extent that government is paying the financial costs of the educational system, a social or public perspective would note the impact of the system on government budgets and taxpayer burdens. Beyond the financial burden of the system on public finances, a social or public perspective could include an evaluation of the extent to which the educational system as a whole helped to achieve aggregate social goals such as economic prosperity, or greater economic, social, or political opportunity for all citizens including those are now poor and marginalized. In short, to the degree that the national educational system is seen within a society or a polity as a key institution in a society that affects not only individual welfare and opportunity, but also the future productivity, sociability, and political stability of the country as a whole, the society as a whole might want to weigh in on the question of how the educational system as a whole ought to operate as well as whether it was delivering services desired and used by individuals for their own purposes. (Moore, 2015) Economists often refer to the perspective I am describing above as a “social point of view.” (Stiglitz and Rosengard, 2015 169-174). They do so to distinguish it from the point of view of the “sovereign, individual consumer.” To suggest that some “social point of view” exists that should be decisive in evaluating the performance of large social institutions such as national educational systems, is to make a significant exception to the usual assumption made in economic and liberal political theory; namely, that individuals are the best or only appropriate arbiter of value in societies. Yet, embracing this perspective – accepting the idea that it might be important to imagine that there is a collective arbiter of the value of education as well as the individual judgements made by the