Learn from the Best in the World

For decades, NCEE has been identifying the world’s highest performing education systems, uncovering their common features and underlying principles, and producing actionable advice based on what we learn to help the U.S. achieve greater success. We study their history and context, visit their schools, and interview teachers, principals, students, parents, policymakers, and people outside the system. Our work is distinguished by our focus on deeply understanding successful systems — examining how the parts and pieces work to support each other. We compare these systems to the U.S. and to one another to better understand how they function, how they are similar and different, and how they address their unique challenges. And we explore how they are changing to anticipate the future.

NCEE’s Blueprint for a High-Performing Education System is a distillation of that research. It organizes what we have learned and continue to learn from the places we study into a blueprint of the core components and elements underpinning the design of high-performing education systems. The NCEE Blueprint offers a design that states or districts that want to match or exceed the performance of the world’s highest-performing systems can use as the conceptual framework for redesigning their own system.