As documented in this special issue, all over the world hard choices must be made in education, government, business, and medicine. Intelligence tests, used intelligently and with appropriate ethical safeguards, are one tool of many that help make hard choices work out well, or at least better than the next-best alternative (Kaufman, Raiford,…

The paper focuses on the promise of equity that underlies centralized evaluation policies and its relation to difference, or in other words to the singularity of the subject. I defend that without taking the issue of difference into consideration, there is no education, and that the unique subject is what is aspired by education. The analyses rely…

This paper attempts to clarify some of the principal obstacles Brazil will have to overcome in order for its educational system to reach the levels of efficiency, equity, and quality demanded by society. It presents a brief analysis of the Brazilian educational system, highlighting the major changes that have taken place over the last 10 years and…

Investigations into the Brazilian education system indicate the system's inadequacies in democratizing education. Instead, education is accessible to those who can afford it and not to those who most need it. Although research evidence consistently shows the positive relationship between socioeconomic characteristics and school access and…

Brazil's education of its emerging middle class is compared in this paper with the U.S. community colleges' education of their middle and lower class constituency. First, introductory comments argue that, just as there are stratified technological levels within the labor market, levels of knowledge can also be distinguished, pointing to access to…