PLANNING AN INTERNATIONAL AUDIT: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION OF INTERNAL AUDITOR JUDGEMENT With nearly as long a pedigree is the idea that these family background effects may operate above the individual level. The school-level association between average student background and average performance is typically much stronger than is the same association at the individual level. The interpretation of school-level correlations is nevertheless controversial: They may arise because academic outcome measures are noisy, implying that group means are more reliable than are individual scores; because students with unobservably attentive parents disproportionately attend schools that enroll observably advantaged students; because the system of education funding assigns greater resources to schools in wealthy.
