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The new program for Rochester's Northeast College Preparatory High School, announced last night at a school board meeting, is both innovative and a definite step forward. And it's encouraging on many levels, not the least of which is the apparent broad involvement of the community: parents, students, school
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I don't know what to make of the business about Joe Ricketts and the Jeremiah Wright-Barack Obama ad-that-wasn't-an-ad. It's nice, I suppose, that Ricketts himself disowned the thing, nice that Mitt Romney sorta ran from it. But seriously: is anybody surprised about any of this? Really? Ricketts, who founded TD Ameritrade,
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It's clear that the economy will overwhelm every other issue in the presidential campaign. And Barack Obama has a tough challenge; news about the US economy is mixed, at best. And the economic problems in Europe could make things worse. A recent Brookings report says Americans think the next generation
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I don't want to get too excited about yet another group that will study how we can do a better job educating our children. But the one Governor Cuomo announced yesterday at least has some of the ingredients it needs. Cuomo has named a 15-member committee to assess the
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Liberal commentators in the media are often accused of exaggerating the faults of Republicans in Congress and ignoring those of Democrats. So it was enlightening this morning to hear Steve Inskeep's discussion with Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein on NPR's Morning Edition this morning, laying out just how
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The Hill website is calling attention to an important speech delivered at the Brookings Institution on Tuesday: by Florida Senator Marco Rubio. Rubio is believed to be on Mitt Romney's list of potential vice presidential candidates, so what he's saying is more than a little newsworthy. Rubio's topic on Tuesday
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After months and months of tension, the Rochester school board has chosen Bolgen Vargas as the district's new superintendent. Now the folks in charge of the district can relax a bit and focus all of their attention on giving the city's children the best education they can. Vargas, who
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"War news" for the past day has been dominated by the story of US soldiers posing for photos holding body parts from dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. That atrocity, of course, will make things worse in our misguided war there. But adding to the pain of hearing that story
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The Maggie Brooks-Louise Slaughter campaign could be one of the most exciting - and most informative - races this region has had in years. But if a D&C Sunday article is any indication, Brooks won't let that happen. The D&C's Jill Terreri tried to get Brooks to express an
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It seems early to be speculating about whom Romney will pick as his vice-presidential candidate, but lots of journalists are doing it. And given John McCain's disastrous choice, maybe we all ought to be paying attention right now. So I'll pass along a link to a pretty extensive look
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The inevitable happened sooner than it might have, and Mitt Romney can now focus on the general election, swatting away, on occasion, comments from the irrelevant Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich. Although it would have helped President Obama if Rick Santorum had stayed in the race a little longer,
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I don't always agree with Diane Ravitch, one of the heroes of the anti-testing, anti-charter education activists, but her article in the March 22 New York Review of Books has a ton of wise reminders about the reality of urban education - and the challenges. Ravitch cites a speech
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I don't play golf, and I'm not interested in learning how. (Took one lesson; decided it's too awkward a way to spend a day, posture-wise.) It's a great game of skill and mind, though; I like to watch the major golf matches, and I plan to watch as much
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Unless Rick Santorum pulls off a miracle (or Mitt Romney really messes up), we've entered the general-election campaign. Romney v. Obama. Won't this be fun? I worried for a while that if Romney were the candidate, and if the economy itself didn't pull off a miracle, the Obama campaign would
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Now that the Planning Commission has denied landmark status for the Cataract Street brew house and North American Breweries can demolish it, some thoughts: I'm sorry the brew house is coming down, but we can't save everything. The brewery seemed to make a compelling case that the building would
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It's probably still too early to tell - and the Supreme Court won't issue its ruling until June -but from what I'm reading online, things aren't looking good for the Affordable Care Act during the arguments before the court. It's a fair assumption that Justices Roberts, Scalia, Alito, and Thomas will
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Worth reading: Frank Bruni's moving piece in yesterday's Times, "Rethinking His Religion," on a former college roommate with whom he has recently reconnected. In part, this is a story of Bruni's own awakening: openly gay when he entered college, he had misjudged the roommate, assuming that because the roommate was a
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Wow! High gas prices may be eating into President Obama's popularity, but Democrats are still having a lot more fun than Republicans. Yesterday's election results in Alabama and Mississippi made it clear: Mitt Romney is nowhere near icing the Republican nomination for president. Rick Santorum won both states. Newt came in
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Since I first heard late last week that newspapers carrying the Doonesbury strip would be given a choice of what to run this week, I wondered what the Democrat and Chronicle would do: run the hard-hitting attack on anti-abortion laws or opt for the mild alternative. This morning, we got the
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Worth reading: Brian Bolduc's interview with physicist Michio Kaku in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, "Captain Michio and the World of Tomorrow." The topic is technology and the future, and in the interview, Kaku offers some tantalizing predictions about health care, the internet, and other things. But he also has a warning:
