Five Best Blogs: No Such Thing As Middle-Class Parents Or Teachers

National School Experiment Starts In New Haven, New York, D.C. Huffington Post: The program offers a lower-cost, one-on-one route alternative to Teach for America for young adults to work with urban schoolkids.

Teach Plus: Introducing the New Majority Huffington Post: So what is driving great early-career teachers away? For a large proportion, it is a lack of leadership opportunities.

The Phantom Menace Rick Hess. When it comes to the question of for-profits and American education, there's often more hysteria than analysis. 

Yes, Our Urban Kids Is Learning Kevin Drum: These results are consistent with plenty of other NAEP results: poor and minority kids are still doing a lot worse than middle-class and non-minority kids, but they are making progress. 

Half of Americans are Poor or Low Income Atlantic Wire:  New census data gives some confirmation to the notion of a disappearing middle class: Nearly 1 in 2 Americans are now officially either low income or impoverished.