Hanna Skandera has been secretary of education for New Mexico for six years. She was appointed by Governor Susana Martinez, who called her a “proven reformer.” Secretary Skandera has fulfilled that reputation. Last year, her efforts to use data-driven results to improve student outcomes netted New Mexico $7 million in School Improvement Grants from the U.S. Department of Education. The state’s new reform model has yielded better test scores, graduation rates and college and career readiness across several districts.

In an October 2016 Albuquerque Journal article, Secretary Skandera said, “What’s exciting about it [the grant monies] is that New Mexico is one of few states to get this award for investing in a proven state-developed model. We’re excited because we said all along that our schools and our districts that are embracing these opportunities to turn schools around are seeing incredible results.”

With leadership changes and our country seemingly as divided as ever before, we have an opportunity to pull together, unite and rally around our kids. It would be easy to shift focus on the personalities in power in Washington, but the real conversation should be about our kids’ future, and making sure they have every shot at success.

The 2016 campaign shed little light on K-12 policies, and I can only hope that my colleagues around the country — like John White in Louisiana, Hanseul Kang in D.C. and Steve Canavero in Nevada — will be encouraged to stay the course. The country’s education system is moving in the right direction and everyone who has worked so hard to get to this point deserves the opportunity to reap the benefits of these investments.

Thankfully, when Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act more than a year ago, more authority for education was returned to the states where it belongs. While the federal government has a role to play and invests dollars, it should not dictate our vision for change, our goals and our priorities.

Now is the time for strong leadership and a singular focus on what matters most — our students. Will they be equipped to be good citizens today and tomorrow? Will they truly be ready to succeed in life? More than ever before, state leadership will be essential, and from our vantage point in New Mexico, we are owning the opportunity to lead.

Regardless of what happens in Washington, education leaders across the country will still work each and every day and execute on proven initiatives that we know will move the needle for our students. That’s what we’ve done in New Mexico, and will continue to do.

Six years ago, nearly all of New Mexico’s schools were failing and too many students weren’t learning or getting the education they deserve. That was simply unacceptable. So, New Mexico was one of the first 11 states to receive a waiver from the federal education law, No Child Left Behind. In exchange, we developed a plan to provide accountability and support to schools, training and evaluation for teachers, and higher college and career ready standards.

Today, New Mexico has a strong foundation to support our schools — and more than ever before to support those struggling the most. We introduced higher standards for college and career readiness and a new assessment to better determine if our students are ready for the next grade level or life after graduation. We launched a school grading system with a greater focus on student growth and other measures, not just proficiency. We created a teacher evaluation that includes multiple measures — including improvement in student achievement — to give our teachers a better tool to refine their craft for their students. With all of these we closed the honesty gap, giving parents and teachers a better look at how their students and schools are really performing.

Building on this foundation, New Mexico is making progress and we’re not looking back. The number of schools rated “A” or “B” has increased by one-third, giving more than 30,000 students a dramatically different and better educational experience. Teachers performing at the highest levels in our evaluation system have increased by one-third. And after our second year of a new assessment aligned with our higher standards, PARCC, we’re seeing more than 12,000 more students on grade in reading or math. That’s at least 12,000 more parents sending their kids to school this year with a new confidence that their child is ready to learn and on track.

Add to that increased graduation rates of nearly six percentage points, and double the students taking AP classes or exams. We’re encouraged by this progress, but it’s not enough and we still have much more work to do. We’ve made these gains by building on success and remaining committed to schools that worked better for our students and their future.

This is the time for true leaders to embrace what is best for kids and not turn back to systems that are simply comfortable or easy. Across the country, students and schools are just now hitting their stride. States should be asking, “how can we reach even higher?” New Mexico has prioritized the things that we believe help students the most, and under ESSA, states can prioritize the drivers of student achievement. ESSA is an opportunity to double down on what’s working and deepen our support to our students and schools.

Chiefs For Change is a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to supporting district and state leaders in creating transformative changes in education. Mike Magee is the first CEO of the organization, whose member chiefs lead education systems serving 4.3 million students, 291,000 teachers and 8,300 schools.

Under Magee’s leadership, Chiefs for Change has created a peer-to-peer Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) workgroup to help state education chiefs serving one-third of all U.S. students create a vision for how they will leverage opportunities and meet new responsibilities under the law.

Ongoing observation and discussion with this group has informed his view of what Magee has called “an exciting moment for public education in the U.S. where chiefs are poised to do some very innovative things.” So, we asked him to share where he thought there may be a groundswell of new ideas and action. Here’s what Mike told us:

Arne Duncan is managing partner at the Emerson Collective and former secretary of education in the Obama administration, as well as former CEO of Chicago Public Schools. As secretary of education, Duncan saw the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act that in many ways is in alignment with much of what he has advocated,including annual tests, expanding pre-K and encouraging innovation at the state and local level. All of these measures point to a new era of accountability. We talked with Secretary Duncan about what that means.

Under No Child Left Behind, Duncan suggests that while the law was well-intended and the focus on transparency and the achievement gap was important, it was loose on goals and very tight and prescriptive on means for achieving those goals. “All of the accountability with No Child Left Behind was focused on single-test forms. Now there’s opportunity for states to become much more sophisticated and look at a set of different outcome and input measures that go way beyond a single test score,” Duncan says.

Duncan proposes states should be looking at high school graduation rates and whether or not those graduates are college or career-ready. Beyond that, he argues that those states that are courageous should be looking at college success and graduation rates and how a range of indicators like student safety, engagement and chronic absenteeism contribute to, or hurt student success.

“Our goal should be to get high school graduation rates as close to 100 percent as possible. Our goal should be to have 100 percent of high school graduates actually prepared for college and able to take college classes instead of remedial classes. It costs the tax payers billions of dollars each year for high school graduates to go to college and pay college tuition to take high school classes again,” he says.

Duncan believes goal-setting isn’t just important from an educational standpoint but from an economic one. He asserts that increasing economic and social mobility and reducing inequity is essential to a way forward for our country, particularly at this moment.

He says, “I worry that our democracy is fraying because we’ve poorly educated so many folks. And you see that on both the left and the right, the anger and fear that people feel that they can’t make it in this globally competitive economy. We owe it to kids and our country to focus on the big picture.” For Duncan, that focus means goal-setting at both the state and national level, then letting debate and innovation, creativity and scaling evidence based work drive the best way to get there.

“No one—not the left or the right— has a monopoly on good ideas,” he says. “Let’s focus on those nation building big goals and learn rapidly from those making the most progress towards achieving them.”