 NCEE's consulting services bring to bear the lessons learned from three decades of benchmarking top-performing systems around the world and enlist the expertise of top researchers, analysts, policymakers, and practitioners from the U.S. and abroad.The process involves comparing the state or district to the top nations, states, and provinces in the world on each of the 9 Building Blocks, so that state and district leaders can see where they are doing well and where they have a distance to go.It involves pulling together a group of state leaders to actually go and visit two or three of the leading countries, talk to many people there at all levels of the system, and see for themselves what can happen if a concerted effort is made and sustained over a long enough period of time to make a difference, and then helping that group help others understand what they have observed and work with a broad group of stakeholders to come up with a long-range plan to build a comprehensive system of the kind that they have seen.