What Does an Outstanding Learning System Look Like? A comparative study of learning systems in selected top-performing jurisdictions

The National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) will fund a two-year international comparative study of learning systems in a set of high-performing education systems. The goal of this work is to understand how and why these jurisdictions are reshaping their education systems to prepare students for an uncertain future, while at the same time highlighting policy lessons drawn from the experience of these systems to date. The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) will lead the study, but will do its work in close partnership with NCEE which will offer advice on the research plan and analysis.

More specifically, this study will focus on:
• how and why these jurisdictions are high-performing now, grounded in a rich, contextualized picture of how and why each jurisdiction developed its own approach;
• how these same systems are adapting and redesigning for the future, grounded in a broad understanding of how the jurisdictions are analyzing and envisioning that future; and
• whether the strategies and features that make these jurisdictions high-performing today will serve them well in the future.