Justin Fox:

Last summer my family moved from Manhattan to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Thanks to a lucky break in the rental market, we ended up with part of a house in a lovely, leafy neighborhood near the Harvard campus. Many of our neighbors are Harvard professors. They’re lovely (not leafy) folks. Smart, friendly, funny. Did I mention smart?
They’re also among the most privileged people I’ve ever met. Privileged not because they inherited large sums of money or lounge around eating bonbons. Privileged because they work in rewarding, stimulating jobs—with lots of opportunity for variety and personal initiative—and seemingly don’t ever have to worry about losing them.

Michael Barbaro:

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, basking in the afterglow of a legislative session that he described as “unusually successful,” said Wednesday that his top priority next year would be limiting retirement benefits for new state and city workers.
He said that his inability to win such an overhaul was the biggest failing of the session that just ended.

In a wide-ranging interview with reporters and editors of The New York Times, the governor was both candid and combative as he offered his thoughts about the poor performance of schools statewide, his concern that high taxes are driving residents away and his reflections on his own use of charm and threats in an effort to win over lawmakers in Albany.

Mr. Cuomo, a longtime student of politics who has recently shied away from commenting on national affairs, called the Republican Party a prisoner of the “extreme right.” He predicted that President Obama would be re-elected despite the nation’s stubbornly high unemployment rate. And he took a gentle swipe at a predecessor, Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a fellow Democrat, who he suggested had failed to understand the delicate interplay between the governor’s office and other elements of society.

Bob Braun:

Do supporters of privatized schooling — including Gov. Chris Christie — really want to destroy public schools? Is even asking the question an exercise in political hyperventilating?
It’s a charge frequently made by NJEA President Barbara Keshishian who said, “Chris Christie has one objective: to destroy New Jersey’s public schools in order to pave the way for their privatization.’’ He declined to comment for this article, but Christie — through spokesman Michael Drewniak — has insisted he likes public schools, just not their unions.

“The Governor’s issue is with a union that opposes reform,’” Drewniak said.

There was a time when advocating the elimination of public schools was so politically toxic that even those who harbored the desire stayed in the closet. That may be changing.

Zaid Jiliani has more.

Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s Rotary Speech is worth a read.

lPeter Lattman:

Education2020, which is known as E2020, provides online courses across 43 states in subjects ranging from algebra to earth science to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
Its products focus on so-called credit recovery, the fastest-growing segment of the online education sector. The credit recovery market serves students who have fallen behind and need to take additional courses to graduate.

These self-paced online classrooms provide a solution for budget-constrained schools that are under pressure to raise their graduation rates but cannot afford to hold additional classes.

Mary Vorsino:

Continuing turmoil surrounding a new contract for public school teachers could delay key Race to the Top education reforms that require union approval, including several the state pledged to launch in the approaching school year, observers say.
Lawmakers, education analysts and others said strained relations between the state and Hawaii State Teachers Association will almost certainly make for harder discussions about such issues as revamped teacher evaluations, the tenure system and incentive pay.
They also point out those matters, in the short term, are unlikely to be tackled until the overall teachers contract is resolved.
Whether the wrangling could jeopardize the state’s $75 million federal Race to the Top grant Hawaii received last August after pledging to make ambitious improvements of its public education system isn’t clear.
But several onlookers agreed the contract dispute — and the absence of negotiations for now — highlight just how tough making important portions of the state’s Race reforms will be.

Jesse Washington:

Millions of Americans endured financial calamities in the recession. But for many in the black community, job loss has knocked them out of the middle class and back into poverty. And some experts warn of a historic reversal of hard-won economic gains that took black people decades to achieve.

“History is going to say the black middle class was decimated” over the past few years, said Maya Wiley, director of the Center for Social Inclusion. “But we’re not done writing history.”

Adds Algernon Austin, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy: “The recession is not over for black folks.”

In 2004, the median net worth of white households was $134,280, compared with $13,450 for black households, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by the Economic Policy Institute. By 2009, the median net worth for white households had fallen 24 percent to $97,860; the median net worth for black households had fallen 83 percent to $2,170, according to the institute.

Paul Tough:

In the early days of the education-reform movement, a decade or so ago, you’d often hear from reformers a powerful rallying cry: “No excuses.” For too long, they said, poverty had been used as an excuse by complacent educators and bureaucrats who refused to believe that poor students could achieve at high levels. Reform-minded school leaders took the opposite approach, insisting that students in the South Bronx should be held to the same standards as kids in Scarsdale. Amazingly enough, those high expectations often paid off, producing test results at some low-income urban schools that would impress parents in any affluent suburb.

Ten years later, you might think that reformers would be feeling triumphant. Spurred in part by the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative, many states have passed laws reformers have long advocated: allowing for more charter schools, weakening teachers’ tenure protections, compensating teachers in part based on their students’ performance. But in fact, the mood in the reform camp seems increasingly anxious and defensive.

Last month, Diane Ravitch, an education scholar who has emerged as the most potent critic of the reform movement, wrote an Op-Ed for this newspaper arguing that raising high-poverty schools to consistently high levels of proficiency is much more difficult and less common than reformers make it out to be. When politicians hold up specific schools in low-income neighborhoods as success stories, Ravitch wrote, those successes often turn out, on closer examination, to be less spectacular than they appear. She mentioned the Bruce Randolph School in Denver, which President Obama singled out in his 2011 State of the Union address as an example of “what good schools can do,” and the Urban Prep Academy in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, which the education secretary, Arne Duncan, praised in a speech in February. Each school graduates a very high percentage of its seniors, but, Ravitch said, test scores at those schools suggested that students were below average in the basic academic skills necessary for success in college and in life.