In this essay the author argues that today's resurgent focus on noncognitive skills, especially for low-income students, may unfairly mask cognitive deficiencies and work to relieve our society of its duty, at which we are currently failing, to help low-income children improve their lives by improving their cognitive skills. The author points to a…

Using Head Start as an example of a compensatory social program based on a liberal egalitarian view of justice, this paper shows how all such programs are fundamentally flawed. In spite of any good intentions, by creating a discourse of deficiency and attempting amelioration through segregation this approach contains the seeds of its own failure.…

The process of effective teaching--teaching that directly leads to student learning of standards-based content--is tenuous at best and easily disrupted by contextual and behavioral factors. In this commentary, I discuss the role of student support and mediation in teacher effectiveness and curricular reform. The most vocal students in physical…

In response to federal initiatives such as Race to the Top (RTTT), Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) flexibility waiver requests, and the Teacher Incentive Fund competition, states have made dramatic changes in their policies related to teacher evaluation during the past three years. Historically, teacher evaluation systems have been…