The National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) is the leading U.S. organization studying high-performing education systems and their implications for dramatically improving American education. In The Design of High-Performing Education Systems, NCEE has distilled the accumulated insights of 35 years of research from the world’s leading systems. The document organizes what they have learned and continue to learn from high-performing countries, provinces, states, districts, and schools about the ways they design their education systems to ensure that all students achieve at high levels.
High-performing education systems have four components: Effective Teachers and Principals; a Rigorous and Adaptive Learning System; an Equitable Foundation of Supports; and Coherent and Aligned Governance. Combined, they create a composite picture of a system that performs at world-class levels and that U.S. states and districts should aspire to match. But a system is more than the sum of its parts: the components have to reinforce one another. Effective teachers and principals activate the rigorous and adaptive learning system for students. An equitable foundation of supports ensures that teachers and principals can teach and lead effectively and that all students come to school ready and able to learn successfully. Coherent and aligned governance incentivizes each component to work in tandem, creates accountability for achieving results, and provides a structure to organize the system.
The most important feature of a high-performing education system is not that it contains all of these components. It is that the components are aligned and designed to work together as a system.
For more, see: https://ncee.org/a-framework-for-policy-and-practice/
