Roughly 30 years ago, American educators stood at a crossroads, with a decision to make about the future of education. With their ears ringing of warnings that they were facing a "rising tide of mediocrity" and recognizing unacceptable gaps in achievement between disadvantaged students and others, educators set off down a path of reform that has, in the words of Frost, "made all the difference"--or has it? One thing known for sure is that it altered how educators have gone about running their schools. In this report, the author urges education leaders and policymakers to rethink the way they have been approaching reform for the past three decades and consider what might happen if they improved schools not from the top down but instead from the inside out--putting curiosity at the center of learning and unleashing a powerful, more engaging system of schooling. The author shows how schools can flip the top-down paradigm by taking a few key, consistent actions that put student engagement, motivation, and true problem-solving at the heart of teaching and learning to create new, more powerful outcomes that set students up for lifelong success.