Though the federal government in the United States, for example, can require states to set quality standards as a condition for receiving federal money for education, it cannot determine what those standards are. In 2009, state school officials and governors in the United States agreed on the principle of establishing national, common standards in core subjects,3 but in 2015, these standards were still insufficiently implemented to affect teachers' practice in the classroom at scale. The unsatisfactory results of the PISA 2000 assessment created huge pressure on policy makers to establish more rigorous and coherent school standards across the states, and to advance from traditional content-based curricula towards competency-based learning.