Hitching a ride on an automotive metaphor comes easily when Michigan is at the center of the story. After the Michigan Department of Education (MDE) spent a couple years noodling in the design shop about the optimum drivers of school improvement, its education engineers were convinced that the local school district was positioned to shift the process into high gear. How, then, did MDE provide the right fuel and a reliable road map? How did the concept become a test car, and the refined prototype move to mass production? Michigan needed a functional design, and the districts needed an owner's manual. Fortunately, MDE was connected to a trustworthy supply chain for transforming good ideas into practical production. The Great Lakes East Comprehensive Center (GLECC) had been at MDE's side through the noodling, and its affiliated Center on Innovation & Improvement (CII) had injected ideas and possible solutions. In 2009, MDE joined the Academy of Pacesetting States, a consortium of nine State Education Agencies (later expanded to 16) organized by CII and facilitated by GLECC. Over the next two years, the Academy provided MDE with a proving ground to test its school improvement efforts, bounce ideas off other States, and envision more productive models for accelerating student learning. In 2011, Michigan and six other states formed the Academy of Pacesetting Districts (APD), with a design created by CII and with the persistent guidance of GLECC's staff. The purpose of this new Academy was to engage the SEA team with district teams to ramp up the district's support for the improvement of its schools.