A differentiated curriculum can provide the basis for discovering, serving, and nurturing academic talent across California's diverse student population. Differentiation provides tools to vary the curriculum or instruction so that students who have already mastered given material continue to progress and students who have a particular interest in an area can pursue it in greater depth or in a personalized way. Although aimed at gifted and talented youngsters, four principles of differentiation can be used to meet the needs of all students. These include acceleration, complexity, depth, and novelty. The responsibility for differentiation is one which all educators must share, at the classroom level and the school level. Educators must develop a new vision of excellence that depends on a fresh understanding of how the core curriculum can be differentiated to provide advanced learning opportunities. The education of the most able students, as with all students, is best developed in challenging contexts which shift the emphasis from the structure of the program to the quality of the curriculum. The core curriculum currently embodied in California's curriculum frameworks is often described as a "thinking curriculum" because it tries to engage students at all times in the search for meaning. In addition to differentiation at the classroom level, successful differentiation at the school level involves new service models, new roles for educators, shared resources, improved assessment practices, and ongoing staff development. (JDD)