In July 2020, NCSL, the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) and the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) launched the 2020-2021 cohort of the Legislative International Education Study Group. This bipartisan group of 20 legislators and legislative staff embarked on a two-year study of the highest-performing education systems to glean lessons that might be applied in our own states to improve our state education systems.
They discussed their work during NCSL’s 2022 Legislative Summit and have released their findings in a report, The Time is Now: Reimagining World-Class State Education Systems. Here they urge their colleagues to leverage the pandemic’s disruption and reimagine and rebuild an education system that better meets improves learning outcomes for all students and meets our future workforce needs.
The report describes their adoption of NCEE’s Blueprint for a High-Performing Education System as a policy framework to improve state education systems, focused on these common elements found in the most effective systems.
This study builds on findings of the first cohort of 26 legislators and legislative staff. They released their seminal report in 2016, No Time to Lose: How to Build a World-Class Education System State by State. Maryland is now implementing a new blueprint based on the recommendation in this report. More information about this and other legislative work was highlighted in the October 2019 cover story of State Legislatures magazine.
We, the members of the Legislative International Education Study Group, recognize that our work is particularly relevant in the time of a global pandemic. The pandemic’s profound disruption of education—including the challenges of distance learning that schools, students and families faced—exacerbated persistent inequities in the system and created a new urgency for systemic reform.
The pandemic also changed the workforce, accelerating the use of artificial intelligence and automation. This will require a new level of skill for students, better coordination between parts of the education system and opportunities for lifelong learning.
We know many parents, teachers and students are exhausted after three years of disrupted learning, eager for normalcy and sick of calls for further change. Students and teachers are working very hard to recover. But they are working in broken systems that are no longer designed for success, and we cannot continue ignore this difficult reality. Silver bullets and siloed policies will not fix this. Instead, we must reimagine and rebuild for success based on policies and practices that work.
Our job as legislators is to work with other policymakers and align resources to create a world-class state statutory framework. Our mission as education policymakers is to ensure that every teacher and student can do their best work in a world-class system that supports them to thrive now and in the future. With the right tools, mindset and collaborative spirit, we can accomplish this goal.
THE TIME IS NOW to reimagine and rebuild an education system that meets our current challenges and workforce needs. We must seize this opportunity to create a better tomorrow for every child.
State legislators and legislative staff across the country are eager to seize upon the disruption of the pandemic to reimagine and transform education in our states. For far too long, our systems have fallen short of preparing all students for college or career, leaving some unable to realize their full potential. Many are behind in academics; many aren’t graduating with necessary skills and aptitudes; and many fail to graduate at all. Since the pandemic, struggling students have fallen even further behind or through the cracks altogether. The consequences for our economy and collective well-being may be severe.
Yet, there lies an enormous opportunity, not just to correct course but to chart an entirely new course and create even better, more effective state systems based on what research tells us works. By studying research, policies, practices and outcomes of the highest-performing systems in the world, we can reimagine effective education systems that better meet the needs of every student.
This is the desire of a cohort of legislators and legislative staff that has spent the past two years during the pandemic diving deeply into research and best practices and hearing from experts all over the world. They wanted to learn lessons from the most effective systems that might be applied in their own states. Their study was focused on British Columbia, Estonia, Finland and Singapore, as well as states like Maryland whose Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education used international best practices to frame their new Blueprint for Maryland’s Future.
They follow in the footsteps of the first cohort of legislators and staff who completed their study in 2016 and released their findings in 2017 in the seminal report, No Time to Lose: How to Build a World-Class Education System State by State. The report issued a clarion, urgent call to their colleagues to waste no more time, to learn from high-performing systems and get to work building highly-effective state education systems. The report argues that the future of the American economy and our national security depends on it.
Using the same research, information and policy solutions that the Legislative International Education Study Group has studied as well as the toolkit they will release in early 2023, state legislators, as well as other state and local policymakers, educators and stakeholders can reimagine new systems that are redesigned for success.
What they learned can provide guidance to states to better support students and educators. It can be tweaked and implemented in any state and can transform education in the U.S. into a world-class system.
The work won’t be easy. It will take time to work with stakeholders, educators and state and local policymakers. But the consequences of doing nothing are much too high. The rewards of innovation and implementation are sure to be transformational.
The time is now . . . to seize this unique moment of disruption while we have the opportunity.
The time is now . . . to reexamine our educational goals, existing policies and practices and honestly evaluate where we need significant change in our state education systems.
The time is now . . . to set higher expectations and evaluate where are systems are falling short.
The time is now . . . to reexamine systems, policies and practices that aren’t achieving their desired outcomes and replace them with those we know will.
The time is now . . . to muster the courage to ask the hard questions, make difficult decisions and put student outcomes first.
The time is now . . . to ensure that all students graduate ready for college or career.
In the report from the first cohort of the Legislative International Education Study Group, No Time to Lose: How to Build a World-Class Education System State by State, legislators warned of the consequences of mediocre educational performance by U.S. students. Unfortunately, our education system has not made any gains in decades and is still stuck in the middle of the pack on international exams, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which measures the performance of 15-year-olds on math, science and reading in developing and developed nations.
Our own measures of student progress, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also show that our education system has not made much progress in decades, with many students falling further behind and very few making any progress. Sadly, the pandemic has only widened the gaps and left our most vulnerable students even further behind. The 2022 results were the worst in decades and underscore the significant impact of the pandemic on student outcomes. These academic test scores, coupled with other measures of student well-being, serve as a warning that our system is failing a vast majority of students, which has significant implications for our future economy.
So what happened? For generations, our education system worked incredibly well. The U.S. led the world in education attainment and quality through the 1970s. We built the biggest economy in the world, fostered an explosion of the middle class, created the backbone of a stable democracy and oversaw a production engine that helped win two world wars.
The world has dramatically changed in the past 50 years, and our education system no longer works for our current circumstances. The cost of communications and shipping dropped dramatically in the post-WWII era, which allowed products to be made somewhere other than where they are sold. We began to outsource labor, including significant segments of our manufacturing workforce to countries with cheaper labor. For every job lost to outsourcing, more than 10 are lost to automation. These include higher-skill jobs like accounting and medical technicians.
International experts stress that automation is likely to create at least as many jobs as it destroys. Middle-skill jobs—high-tech manufacturing, e-commerce and skilled, technical manufacturing requiring less than a bachelor’s degree but significant technical training—are increasingly being created.
Even if there are no fewer jobs, the nature of that work is changing every day. The so-called “jobs of the future” are fundamentally different from the work being done 50 years ago. Agriculture, manufacturing and retail are among the industries that look vastly different than they did 50 years ago. Even many highly specialized, non-routine fields, like medicine and law, are being augmented by automation.
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted our world even more so and underscored our system’s inability to keep up. The pandemic closed down businesses in communities all over the world, and the workforce is not the same upon return. A recent Southern Regional Education Board publication noted that the pandemic accelerated the pace of automation in the workplace by about five years. By 2025, 30% of work activities could be automated. With the economy changing so rapidly, it is increasingly urgent that we address these inequalities.
The one system designed to prepare our future workforce—our state education system—has been further crippled by the pandemic. Our school system remains largely designed to prepare students for 50-year-old workplaces, using 50-year-old approaches to instruction. Despite the best efforts of teachers, students and parents, education systems are very resistant to change, leaving us underprepared for the future of work.
Out of crisis often comes an opportunity to examine where we are, where we want to be, what’s holding us back and changes needed for success. With the recent disruption to our education system due to the pandemic, now is the time to set new goals, be creative and innovative in our policies and practices and re-envision and build toward a better system that meets the needs of all children to succeed in tomorrow’s workforce.
We can learn about the framework and essential elements of high-performing education systems by studying them, talking with experts and adapting innovative and leading-edge policies and practices for our own context. We can convene an inclusive team to set new priorities and create our own statewide shared vision.
Our economic prosperity, our global competitiveness and the stability of our society depend on all students being prepared for the changing global economy. It is urgent that all students—from recent high school graduates pursuing training in manufacturing to college graduates pursuing “knowledge work”—thrive in workforces that are continually changing as technology evolves.
America needs all children and adults to be able to “learn to learn” (having a wide knowledge base that allows them to learn new things easily) and to couple that with “expertise” (having deep disciplinary knowledge in a narrower field in which they apply that knowledge). They also need the “soft skills” and mindsets necessary to cope with the widening world and changing context, including collaboration, respect for differences and a sense of agency, possibility and optimism that the world can change for the better.
State legislators must help our schools do better. As legislators, we can create the enabling policy framework for district leaders, educators and students to learn from the best, do their best work, innovate and adapt to the demands of an economy on the move.
Despite our mounting challenges, there is reason for incredible optimism. Legislative bodies across the country and around the world have put forward innovative policy solutions that are enabling educators to create world-class learning experiences for students. Children in those systems will be well-prepared to take on meaningful jobs after graduation with decent pay, adapt to the changing labor market and find fulfillment in their lives in strong and productive communities. They will be citizens who are well-equipped to contribute to the economic well-being and safety of their countries.
Now is the time to reimagine and recreate an education system that meets our current challenges and workforce needs. We must seize this opportunity to create a better tomorrow for every child.
The work won’t be easy. It will take time to work with parents, students, educators and state and local policymakers. But the consequences of doing nothing are much too high. The rewards of innovation and implementation are sure to be transformational.
Steps to immediately get started were included in No Time to Lose and are just as applicable today:
The first cohort of the Legislative International Education Study Group members identified from their research four elements of highly effective education systems, as reported in No Time to Lose:
Recently experts from high-performing states and districts, as well as the leaders of some of the world’s highest-performing systems—from British Columbia to Estonia to Singapore—confirmed for the study group that these indeed were still essential elements in their systems. Their systems are designed to be resilient and adaptable to meet current needs of students and educators; that is to say they are “learning systems on the move.” Their experts are constantly studying other world-class systems, borrowing new best practices and allowing teachers to innovate. They were well-positioned during the pandemic to adapt and embrace the challenges of remote learning, rise of new technologies and the need to remain consistently state of the art, resulting in improved relevance and effectiveness of implementation.
After a deep study with experts from these systems, the second cohort of the Legislative International Education Study Group has adopted the framework set forth in the Blueprint for a High-Performing Education System, developed by the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), technical partners for this study. NCEE has been studying global trends and innovations in education for over 30 years, and the blueprint synthesizes their findings into a framework for state education systems based on international best practices. As is stated in the blueprint, this cohort also believes that a well-aligned system designed for success yields far greater results than the sum of its parts. The blueprint also summarizes research, best practices and examples that legislators and staff in the second cohort too have discovered to be the elements of a highly-effective education system and a framework for success, which are very closely related to those presented by the first cohort:
As the cohort learned about best practices, they discovered the following education innovations found in the highest performing systems aligned with this framework.
Well-prepared, effective teachers are treated like the professionals they are and have opportunities to grow throughout their careers without leaving the classroom.
Research has demonstrated time and time again that teachers and principals are the most influential in-school factor on student outcomes. The education systems we studied all were built on a corps of world-class, well-prepared teachers working in schools that are organized to develop their expertise. These countries take a systemic approach to developing teachers, with a common vision for teachers’ preservice preparation and ongoing professional learning.
They all have a limited number of teacher preparation programs with curriculum closely tied to core curriculum content and meaningful practice of the teaching craft. Education students often spend a full year or more in a dedicated “teaching school” learning the craft under a mentor before graduating. This is in sharp contrast to U.S. states with dozens of teacher preparation programs, some traditional and some alternative, with different standards and limited opportunities for practice and mentorship. Some states are encouraging district/university partnerships to sponsor teacher residencies, similar to the preparation in high-performing countries, but these are still uncommon.
Teacher learning and development does not end when they leave preparation programs. Some of these systems have an educator career ladder (or lattice, or career growth framework, or system to promote teacher leadership without a formal leadership role) that promotes:
Even in systems that do not have concrete teacher leadership and mentorship structures, ongoing professional learning is prioritized much higher than here in the U.S. Teachers collaborate in teams to learn from and coach one another, assess students’ needs, brainstorm solutions and pilot innovative approaches. They spend less time in front of students and more time honing their craft than here in the U.S. to ensure that students are with the most effective teachers in the world.
Because the U.S. is facing a teacher recruitment crisis in many geographic areas and subjects, legislators have often focused on creating more monetary incentives to teach, like boosting salaries or providing bonuses. The top performing systems do pay their teachers competitive salaries, but the incentives to teach in those systems is mostly tied to the quality of the teacher’s working environment: their opportunities to collaborate, learn, grow and truly impact student outcomes. This finding aligns with research showing that the nature and conditions of work matter as much or more to today’s teachers as the amount they make.
If we are going to address our ongoing educator shortage crisis that’s only been exacerbated by the pandemic, then we must create new systems and working conditions that better prepare and support teachers and principals in addition to ensuring teacher salaries are competitive. Building a holistic system of educator development will require a long-term systemic collaboration with universities, districts and educators. This is essential to secure a new generation of world-class teachers and school leaders and ensure all of our students are well-prepared.
Strong leadership fosters an environment where students and teachers thrive, innovate and succeed.
World-class school systems are built on world-class leadership. They require principals and district and state staff to have in-depth experience in teaching to create more trusting, professional relationships among teachers, principals and policymakers.
Principals in these systems support innovation, ongoing learning, collaboration and strong relationships. These working conditions allow teachers to flourish, and student learning follows.
This form of leadership is built on a commonly-shared understanding of the interplay between oversight and flexibility. These systems have built meaningful assessment and accountability systems that are designed to drive information both up to monitor progress and down to give parents, teachers and students relevant, timely and actionable data. These accountability systems monitor and support the system but also allow teachers and students to have the autonomy they need to make informed decisions and use their professional judgment. This kind of flexible autonomy in the framework of systemwide accountability extends to schools and districts as well. For example, schools and districts often have the autonomy to spend money as they see fit. But they are held accountable for designing and implementing spending plans in line with consistent, systemwide goals.
Personalized and proficiency-based learning pathways for students give them the agency and support to move at their own pace.
High-performing education systems meet all students where they are and give them engaging personalized learning opportunities that speak to their interests, skills and goals. Students all move along a personalized progression of learning that provides all learners the support they need to learn material at their own pace, move on when they are ready and graduate to the next stage of education or work once they have demonstrated their knowledge and skills.
But in exchange for these personalized pathways, these systems expect that students demonstrate their proficiency before they can move on.
This form of proficiency-based education should not imply that any of these systems are tracking systems that push students into “lower tracks” with “dead ends.” Instead, this is a sophisticated, nurturing form of differentiation, coupled with consistent standards for all, that improves equitable outcomes for students. It gives students the ability to learn different things that interest them at different paces and to demonstrate what they have learned in meaningful ways. Pathways have on-ramps and off-ramps to provide maximum flexibility for learners.
Building systems of personalized and proficiency-based education is challenging. It requires a foundation of forward-looking and innovative curriculum and assessment, as well as the infrastructure for students, teachers and parents to regularly share information with one another.
The systems we studied all have national curriculum frameworks that lay out learning goals and content progressions. Responsibility for curriculum and standards does not lie at the national level in the U.S., but there is much we can learn from these frameworks. They provide well-prepared, well-resourced teachers the autonomy to figure out how to teach the content best to reach all learners. The curricula include cross-cutting competencies that are important for the jobs of the future—like critical thinking, collaborative problem solving and creativity—and teachers are expected to embed these competencies across disciplines.
Students are asked to demonstrate mastery of concepts and skills through competency-based assessments at the end of each stage of their education. They are expected to move on to the next stage only after they demonstrate that they are ready to do so—not because they have fulfilled a “seat-time” requirement.
Other forms of assessment include formative assessments to monitor student progress and development and sampling assessments to monitor the progress of the system. High-stakes standardized assessments are limited to key points in a student’s education career; students do not sit for overlong standardized tests every single year, as they do in the U.S.
These assessment results, along with other forms of student data, populate high-tech information sharing systems, such as data dashboards, that allow teachers to share students’ interests, strengths and opportunities for support, especially at key transition points. Student information systems are secure, designed to be easy to understand and navigate, and aligned to the needs of the system.
Lastly, this kind of personalization requires a foundation of trust—trust in young people, with proper guidance and support, to make informed decisions about their future pathways; and trust in the system itself, that it can support a range of choices for all young people while giving them all an equal opportunity to succeed.
Supports for all students allow them to maximize their unique potential.
All the education systems we studied were built on a fundamental commitment that no child’s potential will be wasted. Some children and families require additional support, whether healthcare, childcare or financial support, in order to enter school on a level playing field with their peers and go on to thrive and achieve their potential.
Every system we studied structured these additional supports differently. Some of the systems were built on assumptions—such as centralized healthcare and social welfare programs in Finland and Singapore—that do not exist here in the U.S. Certain principles, however, underpin those systems that can be adapted to better coordinate existing systems of support in our states.
For example, some high-performing systems offer robust health and social supports to both infants and school-age children. These may include guaranteed health screenings and services, home visits, cash payments, parental leave funded by government and assistance with meals and supplies. The policy mechanisms vary, but the goal is to ensure that every child has the resources to be healthy and successful before and when they enter the school.
Some states provide some of these supports, and many are working toward guaranteeing and subsidizing early learning opportunities. While some high-performing systems do offer school-based education to all 3- to 5-year-olds, this is not the only strategy to improve early learning. Others include parent education classes, community enrichment opportunities for children and play-based experiences for young children in community centers. The goal is to ensure that all young children have opportunities to play, explore and learn in developmentally appropriate ways. Parents and families have a keen understanding of what promotes brain activity and early development and academic progress and know what it means to be prepared for primary school.
Once students are in school, high-performing countries continue to provide health, social and learning supports they need to learn at their own pace. The philosophy is that every school should have sufficient staff knowledge and skill to serve all students, regardless of their special needs. For example, students who fall behind in their learning at some point in their school careers might need additional help and support, but they would not be classified as “special needs” students in the same way they would be in the U.S. Instead, well-trained teachers recognize that a student needs additional support, which is immediately given through a variety of intervention strategies. This approach recognizes that students learn and develop at different paces, and the entire system is designed to meet students’ unique, individualized needs. Their systems are ready to meet children where they are, rather than asking children to fit into a generic mold.
In short, all children must have support to access a meaningful, rigorous and relevant education that leads them to rewarding work. Our economy and our society can’t afford to lose any child.
Career exploration and work-based experiences promotes lifelong learning for the jobs of today and tomorrow.
Leaders in high-performing jurisdictions view education as key to their future economic prosperity. Education is the engine that will propel them forward, and teachers are considered “nation builders.” For that reason, they incorporate world-class career and technical education (CTE), sometimes known as vocational education or VET, and often incorporating work-based learning, as a key component to build career pathways. The design of these CTE systems starts with a series of broad conversations about what kind of economy the jurisdiction wants to build and support. With that end in mind, the question becomes what skills and knowledge students need to be job-ready and what certifications are most valuable to incentivize.
This is an ongoing, dynamic conversation. The nature of the economy and the demands of industry are always changing. These systems are adapting to meet the needs of the future. They see this continual change as a challenge—but also a real opportunity. Artificial intelligence and other technologies are opportunities for new job and skill growth, not a competitor to be overcome.
World-class CTE systems are built on a foundation of strong compulsory education, so students enter with academic readiness, and CTE is not in tension with traditional academic study. Curriculum is aligned with economic goals. It is informed and, in some cases, designed by employers to ensure that students are engaged in high-quality training focused on the modern technical skills needed for in-demand jobs. Students work towards industry standards and earn credentials valued in the job market. Teachers and mentors have recent and relevant experience and practice in industry.
Learning in CTE can take place in many different settings: online, at work, in school-based settings or a school-worksite combination. But all include a common expectation that students must demonstrate skills of qualified industry professionals to earn credentials.
CTE programs in the U.S. have traditionally been more geared toward students struggling academically or “tracked” outside of traditional college-ready coursework. CTE is often primarily focused on student engagement and dropout prevention, rather than meaningful career education with a strong academic component. Traditionally, we have expected our CTE students to pass only two or three CTE classes during high school, with no way of verifying mastery. We have offered very few students the opportunity to engage in work-based learning, and our students rarely earn meaningful credentials that would distinguish them from other high school graduates. We have struggled to build world-class career development systems.
However, since the publication of No Time to Lose in 2017, states and districts have been making progress by looking to high-performing CTE systems, particularly Switzerland’s, as models to adapt here in the U.S.
Nonpartisan planning processes bring together all the players in the system to set broadly shared goals for prosperity and plan in cycles to meet those goals.
High-performing systems focus on the future—the future of students, the future of the economy, the future of their society and prosperity. It may sound simple, but what sets them apart is they focus on long-term planning rather than short-term wins. This requires discipline, clarity about vision and goals and a willingness to “reach across aisles” and work with different points of view. It also requires patience and the investment of time. This kind of model provides the nimbleness needed in a changing economy and an uncertain world. For example, it proved particularly well-positioned to face the immediate challenges of the pandemic.
These systems start with a shared societal understanding of education as moral, economic, social and national security imperative. They build on that common understanding by garnering consistent support for a unified set of goals and narrative around education.
This means a structured process for bringing together educators, policymakers, thought leaders and different relevant stakeholder groups to set:
Each jurisdiction has pursued different strategies for achieving these goals depending on their context. Nevertheless, a few common features emerge across each of the structures and processes. All approaches began with a high-level working group representing different stakeholders that determined both a long-term vision for the education system and for students. The visions for students focused on the skills and competencies they need to succeed not only in the next stage of their education but also in work and in life. Often, these student visions were tied into the jurisdiction’s broader economic and society-wide visions, as well. All groups included both business leaders and academics with expertise in anticipating future social and labor market trends.
These high-level groups were broad enough to represent a wide range of stakeholders but limited enough to reach consensus and clarity on the vision. All groups set interim goals to determine whether the system was on target to meeting the ambitious vision.
In order for American education to adopt this approach to intentional planning, a series of profound mindset shifts will be necessary. American policymakers and educators will need to shift away from focusing on silver bullets, compliance culture and partisan wins. Instead, they will need to make a collective commitment across partisan and ideological lines to focus on long-term strategies for whole-of-system improvement to meet bold civic, social and economic goals. To be successful, they must involve everyone who has a stake in the success of our education system—parents, students, educators, business and workforce development leaders, community members and state and local education policymakers.
Legislators have long been frustrated with the lack of progress, and in some cases the backward slide, many states are seeing in this country.They question why, after all of the changes and resources that have been invested, we are stagnant at best and are being outperformed by countries emerging from former occupation and turmoil only a few decades ago. They are hunting for answers from research, best practices and educators across the world and are eager to better understand what makes other systems more successful and how our own state systems can pivot, or completely reform, to make similar gains.
When the pandemic hit the U.S. in 2020, legislators and legislative staff immediately anticipated an unprecedented disruption to learning and the potential impact it would have, pushing back all students and especially our most vulnerable. They were eager to follow in the footsteps of legislators and staff serving on NCSL’s first Legislative International Education Study Group, who published their findings in the seminal report, No Time to Lose: How to Build a World-Class Education System State by State, after spending several years studying the elements of the highest performing education systems in the world with technical experts at the National Center for Education and the Economy and visiting a number of the countries.
Much like the second study, the first was requested in response to startling national and international data on student assessments, like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which measures the performance of 15-year-olds on math, science and reading in developing and developed nations and the U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Legislators were frustrated by the lack of progress after so much attention to reform in America’s schools and wanted to know what other jurisdictions were doing successfully.
As a result of their study, legislators and legislative staff in the first Legislative International Education Study Group identified four essential elements of a highly effective system and urged their colleagues to act to improve student outcomes in order to secure a strong economic future for the citizens of their states.
After receiving requests from additional legislators and staff who also wanted to learn about international best practices, the National Center on Education and the Economy, the National Conference of State Legislatures and Southern Regional Education Board partnered to convene a second Legislative International Education Study Group in September 2020, including 12 legislators and 8 legislative staff.
Rep. Andi Story, Alaska
Rep. Terri Collins, Alabama
Rep. Justin Woodson, Hawaii
Sen. Max Wise, Kentucky
Rep. Jim Davnie, Minnesota
Rep. Llew Jones, Montana
Rep. Graig Meyer, North Carolina
Rep. Mary Heath, New Hampshire
Rep. G. Andres Romero, New Mexico
Sen. Marilyn Dondero Loop, Nevada
Sen. Ryan Aument, Pennsylvania
Delegate Schuyler VanValkenburg, Virginia
Dustin Jones, Alabama
Joe Burks, Kentucky
Lisa Lovello, Louisiana
Porsha Miner, Mississippi
Jennifer Foor, New Hampshire
Jessica Hathaway, New Mexico
Stephanie Buchanan, Pennsylvania
Pierce McNair, South Carolina
The goal was to study common components of high-performing, equitable and efficient education systems across the globe and within the U.S.
The second cohort studied and heard from experts in systems all over the globe:
The study was complete in December 2021. In 2022, the group developed a toolkit to be released in early 2023, providing resources and information for legislative colleagues.
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