The problem of achievement gaps among different subgroups of students has been evident in education for many years. This manuscript revisits the work of renowned educator Benjamin S. Bloom, who saw reducing gaps in the achievement of various groups of students as a simple problem of reducing variation in student learning outcomes. Bloom observed…

Guidelines for and obstacles to focusing on student learning outcomes as the primary educational goal are presented in this paper. Five obstacles that impede the focus on student outcomes are the beliefs that: learning should be normally distributed; education's purpose is to select talent; the purpose of testing is for evaluation only; curriculum…