As a guinea pig in a nationwide experiment, Chicago’s Philip D. Armour Elementary School is seeing drastic improvements in student performance, the Huffington Post reports. Even the most ardent critics of the nationwide Common Core Standards initiative can’t dispute the school’s strong student improvement: Armour’s state standardized test scores have moved up 16 points [1], in a school where 98 percent of students are low-income and come from a high-crime neighborhood, PBS NewsHour reports. Illinois is one of 46 states that have adopted the Common Core State Standards [2], a set of academic benchmarks that raises the bar for teaching and learning across the country. The goal of the states-led initiative is to establish a uniform set of expectations for what students must learn, eliminating educational inequities, and to ensure college and career-readiness…