This article describes the evolution of three different models in educational policy-making in Ontario. In the late 1960s, education policy moved away from reliance on a traditional, centralized, administrative-agency approach and gravitated towards a decentralized, asysmmetrical policy interdependence that dominated until the mid-1990s. The NDP government erected a more centralized scaffolding, with the centre undertaking a greater tutelary role vis-a-vis local authorities. The aim was to make more transparent the rules and standards by which local authjorities, trustees and educators would operate and be held accountable. The education minister also sought to bolster local democracy by widening local parental participation in decision-making. Since 1995, the Conservative government has erected a politicized administrative agency that has adopted a confrontational stance towards stakeholders, reduced the powers of school board trustees, decimated middle-level professional staffing, and muffled teacher union executives. decision-making now seems to reside with Harris advisers and key cabinet ministers, whose stances driven by an amalgam of neo-conservative ideology and by voter opinion. This neo-conservatie approach differs in its embrace of a social conservatism - that government maintain socialo order and that excessive concern for individual choice and liberty not be allowed to undermine it. Harris' social conservatism, in its K-12 reforms, includes an embrace of regulation, hierarchy, monopoly and uniformity in the design of public policy