######## A Mixed Public/Private Social Production System

These observations describe a complex social production system that mobilizes and deploys assets in response to public, philanthropic, and private demand for educational services, across a complex array of educational suppliers. We often try to analyze this system through the lenses of two different ideologies:

- • a public ideology that wants to insist that education is both a right and a duty at the individual level that must be managed not only to satisfy the individual desires of parents and children, but also underwrites the creation of a prosperous, sociable, and just society by ensuring that the educational system as a whole takes on a particular structure, conduct and performance that can achieve that result, and continue to learn and improve over time as to how best to achieve these individual and social objectives; and
- • a private, market ideology that assumes the goal of the educational system is to satisfy the desires of the parents and children who receive and use educational services to advance their own ideas about how they would like to be educated, that wants to preserve the freedom of individuals to choose educational services that fit their particular ideas of a good education (particularly if they are willing and able to pay for it or provide it for themselves), and that approves of some level of government financing and regulation of educational services (and consumption!) to be able to take advantage of the power of education to produce aggregate public benefits as well as individual private benefits.

But as we have seen, these different ideologies generate practical ideas about how to organize the educational system for sustained learning and continuous productivity gains which have significant weaknesses as well as strengths.

###### Principles to Guide the Analysis

To consider the way forward, we may have to abandon some ideological purity in search of some kind of mixed political/bureaucratic and market system that can work by taking the strengths of both systems, and seeing how they might best be combined. We begin with some principles, and then go to some concrete examples that might hold lessons for us.

######## Principle 1: The National Education System is the Proper Unit of Analysis for Results, Performance, and Intervention

The first principle is that we should not give up the idea that the proper unit of analysis is the performance of the sector as a whole, not necessarily the performance of particular policy initiatives launched by national government, nor the performance of particular kinds of educational providers, nor the performance of particular organizations delivering educational services, nor the development of particular programs or methods that seem to improve educational outcomes along particular dimensions in particular locations. All these particular activities designed to improve the performance of the sector as a whole are potentially important ingredients of achieving that goal, and each can be evaluated in terms of their contribution to that goal as a particular ingredient. But the ultimate test is whether any of these continuing efforts or new initiatives can move the needle with respect to the aggregate social