Moreover, the cross-school
differences in the relative success of advantaged and disadvantaged
students argue for enacting school accountability policies that shine the light on the success of specific populations, rather than concentrating solely on
overall schoolwide
performance levels or gains.
Two weeks ago I argued that it will be difficult to evaluate whether adopting the Common Core standards is,
overall, a good move, because so many factors go into
student outcomes (and interact with one another) that a positive change
in one factor might yield no
difference in student performance.