California's education reform strategy includes creating high-quality curriculum frameworks to upgrade K-12 education, which raise expectations for students' knowledge and understanding of language arts, mathematics, science, and history/social science. The frameworks focus on learning for understanding, problem-solving, and applying knowledge to real-life situations. The goals are to produce students who know how to learn, analyze issues, solve problems, and apply their knowledge to real-world problems.

California's public school student achievement is improving but still has a ways to go to meet world class standards. Increasing enrollments, declining revenues, and political issues are distracting from education reform. This policy brief seeks to bring attention to building public visibility and political consensus around national strategies for accelerating education reform. The message is not that California's public education system will be subordinated to a monolithic national reform effort.