Although these columns have hung back from political endorsements in tomorrow’s primary election, our eye is caught by an embattled incumbent, assemblyman Roger Green of Brooklyn, who offers an example of the kind of political growth that his fellow liberals could learn from. Mr. Green, a former city schoolteacher, first came of age politically as a dashiki-wearing proponent of decentralization. Unlike many of his comrades from the street protest era, however, he kept a close eye on the collapse of the school system over the years and concluded that the risk of change was greatly outweighed by the certainty of failure. In recent years, he has walked a thoughtful and unorthodox course of pressing for innovations like charter schools and demanding a higher level of accountability by parents, teachers, administrators, and politicians. His signature project, the creation of the Benjamin Banneker High School at Clinton Hill, is a charter school in all but name. Mr. Green likes to boast that Banneker’s mostly inner-city students recently outscored their counterparts from Stuyvesant High School on the state Regents physics exam.

Recently, Mr. Green used his bully pulpit as chairman of the state’s black and Latino legislative caucus to urge support for Mayor Bloomberg’s takeover of the city’s schools — an act of leadership that distinguished him from his colleagues and earned him a place at the mayor’s side on the day the historic transfer of control took place. He also persuaded the caucus (if not this newspaper) to sign on to the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, which seeks to equalize the current formula that provides $12,000 a year for students outside the city and only $8,000 for the inner-city areas that need at least as much in the way of resources as the suburbs and certainly not less. We wonder why more officials representing inner-city areas haven’t followed Mr. Green’s lead and tried to address the education crisis without simply parroting the latest talking points supplied by the United Federation of Teachers. We wish him luck in tomorrow’s primary.