The article is a transcript of a talk given by the author at a University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Education symposium. He argues that the role of the state has changed quite dramatically since the 1960s. From the postwar period through the 1970s, there was an emphasis on expanding the state, and an emphasis on growing more schools, creating more forms of schooling, expanding community colleges, and experimenting with different forms of schooling like magnet schools or alternative schools. There was really quite a period of optimism and a lot of public resources to expand public options and public projects. In the 1960s, this focused on civil rights and the integration of so-called "peripheral groups" into the mainstream. The public project was not only about expanding education but about incorporating so-called "peripheral groups" on the edges of the "mainstream," which was defined as an increasingly suburban White population who pulled groups into that mainstream and used schools to socialize people in that common core. The public spaces that opened up were focused on individual rights, civil rights, and social integration. However, starting in the 1980s, those public spaces in stages of political action began to diminish. There was the concern that the money spent on education did not produce higher test scores. Around this time, there was movement of accountability and the narrowing of learning aims to market innovations. He critiques these recent movements.