(Guest post by Greg Forster)
I’m not sure what alternate universe this version of Mike Petrilli is visiting from. Here on Earth Prime, we already have all the tools we need to evaluate our schools using high standards. That was sort of the whole point of my article.
Wait, it gets better. The tools I used in my article compare the US to other countries, measuring how we’re doing against our global peers and competitors. That’s the kind of comparison we need most, for a variety of reasons. Common Core isn’t internationally benchmarked; its standards were cooked up in smoke-filled rooms by politicians and their cronies, not by education experts. So to the extent that political power forces us to pay more attention to CC and thus less attention to the tools we’re using now, we will know less than we did before about how we’re doing relative to other countries.
Beam me up, Jay, there’s no intelligent life down here.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
No fair, Greg. You took more than 140 characters to explain your idea.
Mike now complains that Global Report Card does not allow comparisons for individual schools and students. As for schools, he should wait for GRC 3.0, which will be coming out soon. And as for students he might keep in mind the limitations of testing to tell us much about individuals — given that we have no counter-factual for whether that individual would do better or worse somewhere else, high amount of error at individual level, etc…
But Jay, you don’t understand – children are nothing but interchangeable widgets, and the school system won’t work right until it treats them that way. I mean, more so than it does now.
153 characters – dammit!
I’m proud not to know the correct number.
Sorry, let me try that again:
153 characters – dammit! Next time I’ll get it down to 140.