This paper, largely based on new, previously unused documents from US archives, considers the consultancy group financed by the Ford Foundation in 1960 to support the school reforms the Italian Minister of Education Giuseppe Medici was promoting. The group was headed by James Bryant Conant, and its evaluations were based on principles of "meritocratic" democratisation: universal access to comprehensive lower secondary school should have been accompanied by "cooling out" mechanisms at subsequent levels. Conant's suggestions were ignored. In 1962, the new "Scuola media" was established thanks to a compromise between the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, and was founded on uniform treatment and equal outcomes rather than equal starting points in competition. In spite of this, the Italian experience was subsequently used within the Ford Foundation to integrate Conant's ideas in their strategies for international programmes, and gave birth to planning studies for national education requirements based on manpower needs.