Tom Long, architect of the 1995 victory and chairman of the Tories' re-election campaign, insists this habit of democratic centralism is all part of the plan. First you wrench control of the state away from the many vested interests that had attached themselves to it: activists and unions, tax-happy school trustees and bureaucratic empire- builders. Then you shrink the state. "We're not the government," he likes to say. "We're the people who came here to fix government." So: la lutta continua. By order of the Khmer Bleu, party of the permanent revolution.

Except, the revolution looks suspiciously like the regime that preceded it. It isn't just that program spending, under the slash-and-burn Tories, is now higher than it was in the last days of the NDP. It is that the Tories, for all the battles they have endured with teachers, civil servants and other agents of Leviathan, have done almost nothing to alter the basic structure of government. Such efficiencies as they have imposed have been more aimed at running the existing system a little harder: central planning on the cheap. They are the reforms of a Gorbachev -- fewer vodka rations all round -- when what is needed is the sort of root-and-branch radicalism the party was elected to provide.

The latest humiliating Tory retreat, this time over school closings, is a case in point. The Harris people take great pride in their education reforms, and with some justice: a more rigorous curriculum, with clear benchmarks of what students are expected to know when; standardized, province-wide testing; and, most courageously, equalized per-student funding across the province, that all students might have the same quality of public education, regardless of how rich their community is. This last was achieved only after the province took control of education taxes away from local school boards, to their immense displeasure.

Yet rather than take the logical next step, that of abolishing the school boards altogether (the constitutional protection for separate school boards notwithstanding), the Tories contented themselves with reducing their number. The notion that fewer, larger school boards might represent some sort of progress reflects the Tories' peculiarly Soviet mindset. They took just as much stick as if they had really changed anything, while leaving their adversaries in possession of a formidable series of command posts from which to sustain their opposition to reform.

Specifically, the province might have won the power to allocate funds between boards, but it left the boards to divvy them up between schools. Hence the Toronto District School Board's explosive stunt could only have been expected: threaten to close 138 schools, and watch the province run for cover. It didn't help that the Tory funding formula was a fit of Kremlin-inspired insanity: a dense web of envelopes and sub- envelopes setting fixed amounts for each purpose from which boards were forbidden to deviate, the quotas determined by some mad boffin's calculations of the average number of square feet of floor space each student required.

Now let us imagine a different model. Suppose the province, instead of sending the money to the boards, to mishandle according to the province's strict instructions, gave the money directly to parents. No complex formula: just a simple, per-student grant, adjusted for differences in local costs and demographics, to pass on to the school of their choice.

And suppose, instead of answering to boards and bureaucrats, each school were independently managed, free to set its own budget and its own priorities, within the overall guidelines set by the province.

Suppose, further, that any group of educators could start a school and receive public funds in this way, so long as a) they accepted all comers, and b) they charged no additional fees. Suppose, that is, that the province opened the doors to charter schools.

Many parents might prefer their children attend smaller schools closer to home, rather than busing them off to whatever vast warehouse the local board might have on offer.

Why should they not have that right?

In a flash, the question of which schools to keep open, and which to close, would be depoliticized: no longer a prize-fight for distant demagogues, the matter would be settled, quietly and without rancour, by the choices of parents. Now there would be a revolution.