ABSTRACT
The market-based approaches taken up seriously in three of the countries are founded on the neoliberal economic ideas that the 'invisible hand', that is the expression of individual interests will produce social benefits as individuals pursue their own goals in private markets. One lens is provided by the scores of students on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Meanwhile, next door Canada flirted briefly with privatization ideas in locales such as Ontario, and then rejected those initiatives in favor of a strong public investment strategy. Democratization was a major theme of the early 1970s in Chileone that extended to education. The Finnish version of decentralization is very different from the kind of decentralization that has occurred in jurisdictions pursuing privatization. As in Chile, the market-based approach has been accompanied by considerable deprofessionalization of teaching in both the private and public sectors.
