To help state leaders build strategies for sustaining their education agendas over the long run, Achieve launched "Taking Root: Strategies for Sustaining the College- and Career-Ready Agenda," generously funded by the GE Foundation. Through this project, Achieve conducted research on state education policies that have been sustained successfully to better understand the factors that had the most significant impact. Achieve focused on reforms in Indiana, Massachusetts, South Carolina and Texas because these states were able to sustain significant education reforms over at least a decade. This paper summarizes the lessons learned from Achieve's research in the four states and highlights examples and promising strategies from those states and others. Achieve also published separate case studies for each of the four states that go into greater detail on how their reforms were enacted and sustained. www.achieve.org