the Legislature and Gov. Eliot Spitzer adopted a new formula that promised more help for poor districts and eventually $7 billion per year in added funding. That promise evaporated in the recession, spawning two lawsuits aimed at forcing the state to honor it. A lawsuit by a group called New Yorkers for Students' Educational Rights estimates that, despite increases in recent years, the state is still about $5.6 billion a year short of its commitment under that formula.

Is it time to stop obsessing about inequality? Whatever the reason, suddenly inequality seems to be not only at the top of the liberal agenda, but in the thoughts of concerned American voters. In his view, the defining challenge of our era is that workers in the bottom half of the distribution can no longer trust that their living standard will double every generation.

s it time to stop obsessing about inequality? Perhaps it was President Obama's speech last December, calling the nation's vast income gap "the defining challenge of our time." The American publication of the French economist Thomas Piketty's blockbuster "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" must have helped.