In Sunday's New York Times, Benedict Carey turns in an especially rosey take on cognitive science and education.

Do I think early grades need better, more algebraic math? YES. Without question. Do I buy the idea that cognitive science is going to suddenly and dramatically improve the curriculum?

Well...

The trouble is that too often limited studies become the basis of gadgets and curricula and dreaded "programs" that have their own sales force. This means what teachers end up being asked to do in the classroom in the name of brain science may not be validated by what actually happened in the lab.

Sophisticated imaging and experiment structures may be new, but I have a feeling this sentence, "the teaching of basic academic skills, until now largely the realm of tradition and guesswork, is giving way to approaches based on cognitive science," could have been written 50 or 75 years ago. Maybe we'll get lucky and Diane Ravitch will tell us. And there are some serious skeletons in the cognitive science closet when it comes to determining what some kids can or can't do. Cheers to the brain science community for landing this on the front page, but color me skeptical.

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One of our most important recommendations for improving teacher evaluation systems is that they be designed to provide meaningful feedback that can be used to streamline and target professional development. We can all agree that scattershot professional development is a waste of time and money. But as districts spend federal money to revamp and improve supports for teachers, how will they be accountable and prove that professional development is working?

The bottom line here, of course, is student achievement. But it could be difficult to untangle the impact of new professional development from other reforms, especially if that change is system-wide. Instead, it seems likely that districts would look for improvements in teachers - both in their self assessment and their evaluations.

That's a problem, because our current evaluation systems have a distribution that's skewed heavily towards the higher ratings categories. In order to differentiate excellent teachers from good teachers from not-so-good teachers, we need to shift the ratings curve so that teachers are distributed among different ratings categories - down the ratings scale, not up. If we ask districts to make this difficult correction at the same time they need ratings to go up to prove new professional development is working, are we setting ourselves up to fail?

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