Benchmarking: What It Is, How It Works, and Why Educators Desperately Need It

By C. Jackson Grayson Jr.

Arthur C. Clarke, the great science fiction writer, once observed that cave dwellers froze to death on beds of coal—lying on the very resource that could have saved their lives. But they had no way to find the coal, mine it, or use it. Today, several millennia later, the same phenomenon is happening again—this time, in education.

America’s K-12 education system is asleep on beds of best practices. They come from thousands of workable solutions that exist right now—down the hall, across the district, across the nation. Like coal to the cavemen, however, these best practices are hidden, untapped, and unmined. In educator terms, they are not “going to scale.”

The single best way to accelerate the rate of improvement in K-12 education is through widespread benchmarking of these best practices. This is how we can bring to the surface and put...