Frustrated by their own state's pace and direction of school improvement, eight California districts have banded together to move ahead on rolling out the Common Core State Standards and designing new teacher evaluations based in part on student performance. Known as CORE--the California Office to Reform Education--the member districts also include Long Beach, Fresno, Sacramento, Oakland, and Clovis and Sanger in the Central Valley. The unusual, large-scale collaboration began among the districts' superintendents and has since trickled down to upper-level administrators and teachers. It started more than two years ago as an initiative to help state officials write a second Race to the Top application for California.