ABSTRACT
On the edge of a city in the early years of this new century, a group of teachers sit with their building administrator and try to account for scores from their school’s most recent round of state-mandated exams. The administrator distributes scores for the students in each class to individual teachers and in her remarks focuses on comparative gains or losses from previous years across subject areas or subgroups of students, such as males and females or groups disaggregated for their national origin, race, and indicators of family background and income. She asks questions she hopes will get the teachers to share ideas about how to raise scores in the next round. What accounts for incidents of increase? Was it a new textbook? Greater alignment of instruction with test content? A new instructional approach? And what might explain declines in some classes? What do the teachers think they can do to make sure the declines are reversed next year and the gains remain?
