In 2010, when the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development's (OECD) released its 2009 PISA results, the big story was that eight of the top ten performing systems were Asian. Almost everyone overlooked the strong performance of Canada: sixth overall and the highest English-speaking and French-speaking nation in the world. The four highest-scoring provinces--Alberta, B.C., Quebec, and Ontario--performed very similarly on PISA, despite very different educational policies and strategies, parties of political control, and relationships between governments and teacher unions. So what explains their performance? It cannot be attributed to specific short term policies, but to constellations of policies that run across provinces and systems, accumulate over time, and are consistent with a longstanding culture of high regard for public education, strong support for the teaching profession, and broadly collaborative and inclusive processes of educational change management, inspired by sets of commonly shared beliefs. (Contains 8 endnotes.)