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Some radical reform zealots have used America's standing in international comparisons of student achievement to justify all manner of miracle-cure education reform propositions. (Abolish school boards! Abolish school districts! Abolish school buildings!)

Cooler heads have looked beyond mere rankings to examine practices common to the most successful countries. Most recently, Achieve, the National Governors Association and the Council for Chief State School Officers released a report on such practices.

As I read it, Benchmarking for Success offers some important (if implicit) lessons for reformers:

• Beware miracle cures that have little to do with what gets taught and how it gets taught;
• Seek coherence rather than erratic, disjointed interventions;
• Build public schools' capacity for success.

The report offers more specific recommendations for creating a world-class public education system. Here are a few highlights:

• States should collaborate to create a common core of content standards benchmarked against standards from the highest-performing nations. As in the most successful countries, these standards stress depth and coherence over exhaustive coverage of material.
• States should work together to ensure that instructional tools, including textbooks, assessments, and classroom curricular materials, actually support excellent instruction that reflects those standards. In other words, teachers should no longer have to fend for themselves with little more than poorly-designed state assessments to set their instructional direction.
• States should set policies that help schools recruit, retain and support effective teachers and leaders--especially in schools serving low-income students. (See the Learning First Alliance'spolicy framework for staffing high-poverty, low-performing schools.)
• Accountability systems should include on-going monitoring, timely interventions and support for high performance. Rather than merely punishing failure, these systems use multiple mechanisms to assess school performance, diagnose root causes of problems and identify practices that foster success.
• States should measure their students' achievement against the achievement of students in the highest-performing countries. The aim of this work, of course, would be to continue identifying the conditions and practices that fuel student success.

It's fair to say that Benchmarking for Success lays out a far more coherent and nuanced system of standards, accountability and school supports than we currently enjoy in the United States.

That said, I wish the report had offered an additional recommendation. As long as we're identifying best practices in the highest-performing nations, shouldn't we examine how those nations coordinate their in-school and out-of-school supports for children's well being? In recent Public School Insights interviews, education leaders in at least two such nations listed support for student health and well being as an essential ingredient of school success. (See our interviews with Finland's Reijo Laukkanen and Canada's Raymond Theberge.

Unfortunately, this more comprehensive approach has fallen victim to the perverse either/or logic that dominates so much discussion of school reform--as if the mere acknowledgement of poverty's effect on student performance would prompt us all to abandon vigorous, well-designed school improvement efforts. If anything, international comparisons should remind us that school reform is not a zero-sum game.)