Cheshire, Connecticut is saying no to federal funds for low-income students, thereby escaping federal accountability rules. It makes sense. Cheshire doesn’t have that many poor students and therefore doesn’t qualify for much money. The cost of compliance exceeds the grant. Of course, it means Cheshire will face no scrutiny of how well it educates its small minority of disadvantaged students.

Meanwhile, more than 100 urban superintendents and education leaders have asked Congress “to resist pressure to scale back the accountability provisions in the No Child Left Behind Act,” reports Education Week.

The signatories to the letter objected to “the effort to roll back” parts of the law as “a thinly veiled attempt to turn back the clock to a time” when schools could average the performance scores of their students. Schools, the letter said, could “coast” on that number, rather than revealing the academic struggles of some children, such as those from low-income families and those enrolled in special education.

Education Trust, which focuses on disadvantaged and minority students, organized the campaign.

Education News has a correspondent in Iraq who’ll be writing about the attempt to rebuild the school system.

Major Softy — that’s his real name — is distributing school supplies to Iraqi children and teachers. Check here for details.

Apparently, decent pencils were difficult to get in Iraq during Saddam’s reign, and are much appreciated now. Teachers need supplies too.

The National Education Association, one of the strongest forces in Democratic politics, claims to make no political expenditures. The IRS is auditing the union to check on that claim. The AP reports:

The IRS is auditing the nation’s largest teachers union, scrutinizing an organization that works energetically to elect candidates but files tax returns reporting zero political expenditures from member dues.

. . . The NEA has tax-exempt status as a union but must report political expenses “direct and indirect” on its tax return. Some of those expenses could be considered taxable by the IRS. It defines a political expense as “one intended to influence the selection, nomination, election or appointment of anyone to a federal, state, or local public office.”

The Associated Press, which first reported on the NEA’s tax returns three years ago, has reviewed the NEA’s filings from years 1993 through 1999 and hundreds of pages of internal NEA documents. The records showed the 2.7 million-member union spent millions of dollars to help elect pro-education candidates, produce political training guides and gather teachers’ voting records.

A July 1999 strategic plan, for instance, stated the union budgeted $4.9 million for the 2000 election for such things as “organizational partnerships with political parties, campaign committees and political organizations.”

Part of the money, the document said, would be spent on a “national political strategy” which involved “candidate recruitment, independent expenditures, early voting, and vote-by-mail programs in order to strengthen support for pro-public education candidates and ballot measures.”

The NEA survived an audit 10 years ago. This time the conservative Landmark Legal Foundation filed a complaint.

Social studies students at a Colorado high school skip showers, panhandle for lunch money and sleep in their cars in the school parking lot as part of a class designed to teach them to be activists.

As part of their assignment, students agree to wear one set of clothes for several days straight (even if they spill salsa or other staining foods on themselves, as several students admitted doing Wednesday).

They also avoid regular social circles for a week, forgo showers for a couple of days, panhandle for lunch money in the cafeteria and temporarily give up cars and cell phones.

Tonight, they’ll sleep in their cars in the school parking lot.

The goal, said Laura Brayman, executive director of HomeAid Colorado, is to open students’ eyes to the realities of homelessness — which increasingly affects teens and families – and perhaps prod them to activism.

Marissa Leyva, a 17-year-old senior, is the best panhandler, possibly because she scrounged food from friends early in high school, when her family was struggling. Leyva has doubts about the project.

“I felt like I was mocking homelessness instead of helping it,” she said.

Maybe she’s too close to real poverty to get a thrill from playing at it.

Via Interested Participant, who posts the Five Rules of Homelessness.

Go to Small Victory for the envision a politically correct holiday season contest.

Like Kimberly, I’m fond of this version of “Walking Through a Winter Wonderland”:

In the meadow we can build a snowperson,
Then pretend that he or she is a member of the clergy from the religion of your choice or, if you prefer, a justice of the peace.

He or she’ll say: Are you married?
We’ll say: No person,
Because marriage is a paternalistic construct
Designed to suppress women

Or, to stick to scholastic themes:

Hark how the bells, sweet silver bells, all seem to say “Throw cares away!” with the aid of ritalin or another doctor prescribed mood stabilizer, but not with any illegal substances, because we have a zero tolerance policy.

Criticism is not censorship. In particular, criticism by people without power of people with power is not censorship. But you wouldn’t think it from this Washington Post story in which professors accused of propagandizing in class complain that conservative students are intimidating them. Young Conservatives of Texas maintains a “watch list” of professors the group feels are biased and promote personal agendas in class.

(Austin) Kinghorn insists the list is a tool for students to make informed course choices. Critics call it a blacklist whose goal is to intimidate liberal professors and cramp academic freedom.

The list censures (Journalism Professor Robert) Jensen, for instance, for subjecting “the unsuspecting student to a crash course in socialism, white privilege, the ‘truth’ ” and “using class time . . . to ‘come out’ and analogize gay rights with the civil rights movement.”

In response, Jensen, who said he is bisexual, said the list could have an ominous effect on the faculty: “If professors are constantly worried about being branded liberal, and not just liberal but inappropriately executing their duties, then it’s going to make people a little nervous and there’s a self-censorship effect.”

Students self-censor if they disagree with a close-minded professor. (Kinghorn, who was taking a class from Jensen in September, 2001, switched his major from journalism.) Do professors really cower because conservative students — a minority on almost any campus — criticize their teaching? Jensen, by the way, has written a book called Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream. And he’s worried about being branded liberal?

When Hillary’s in D.C. and Bill’s alone in Chappaqua, he likes to curl up with Thomas a Kempis’ “The Imitation of Christ” or “Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics” by Reinhold Niebuhr. Poetry? It’s Eliot, Yeats or Angelou. Yeah, sure.

For the opening of an exhibit on books he received as gifts, Bill Clinton released a list of his 21 favorite books. Terry Teachout and Jane Galt have their doubts. Jane writes:

It’s exquisitely sculpted to cast him as the perfect New Democratic intellectual, with nods to every ethnic constituency, every intellectual pretension, and of course, with TS Eliot, the aging hippie stoner “Wow, like that stuff totally blew my mind, man — it’s like, uber-groovy” contingent. It’s also (as all such lists are) perfectly false. I find it impossible to believe, for example, that WB Yeats is your favorite poet if you are not Irish. I find it doubly impossible to believe that TS Eliot (Four Quartets) is actually one of Bill Clinton’s 21 favorite books. Politicians might as well title these lists “people whose names will make me look smart to intellectuals and inoffensive to voters” and be done with it.

I can believe he likes Yeats. I can’t believe T.S. Eliot and Maya Angelou on the same list.

Call me insensitive. But I don’t care if a first grade Thanksgiving pageant fails to represent the full spectrum of indigenous cultures. At a Skokie, Illinois elementary school, Indian and Pilgrim costumes were banned from the Thanksgiving celebration because of one parent’s complaint. The Chicago Tribune reports:

After a parent complained that the costumes the children had made might be offensive, the principal told the kids to leave their construction-paper headdresses on the classroom shelves.

Those who had opted to be pilgrims fared no better. Their paper black hats and bonnets also were banned, and for the first time in more than two decades, the 1st graders at Madison School commemorated the events of October 1621 in their school clothes.

Principal Pete Davis consulted the American Indian Center, which has become a consultant for schools on how to celebrate Thanksgiving. Center officials say dressing up promotes stereotyping.

“The things schools are doing is they are representing Native Americans as one group of people, not a diverse community,” (David) Spencer said. “It’s incredible how many Chicago public school teachers don’t know anything about indigenous culture.”

Instead of the re-enacting the first Thanksgiving in costume, Madison School’s first graders listened to Leonard Malatare talk about Lakota Sioux culture. Which has nothing to do with the Wampanoags — part of the Eastern Algonquin confederation — who celebrated the first Thanksgiving.

Malatare taught the pupils a few words in the Oglala Lakota language and led them in a traditional blessing.

And no parent was offended by the blessing?

Captain Yips found links suggesting that Massasoit’s tribe — the ones who actually participated in the original Thanksgiving feast — did wear feathers. In fact, they wore droopy feathers, which heightens the resemblance to the typical first-grader-designed head dress.

My first dramatic role came as Goodwife Bradford in the fourth grade Thanksgiving pageant at Ravinia School. I still remember my line. “The common house needs cleaning.” Every girl got a line — mostly filling in feast back story — while we cleaned. Then the boys took over for the denoument.

From a San Jose Mercury News story on Stanford’s first Fulbright scholar from Mongolia:

A young woman from the steppes of Mongolia was living in Russia in 1988. A friend invited her to a secret screening of an underground movie about a struggle against oppression.

“There were 20 or 30 people in a small basement room,” Oyuna Tsedevdamba recalled recently. “Humankind was fighting these machines, and my first feeling was, ‘It is about us. It is about everybody who is living in this system’.”

She was watching “The Terminator.”

Tsedevdamba, a pro-democracy activist in Mongolia, is studying international policy at Stanford.

No decent parent would let their child be alone with Michael Jackson, writes Rabbi Dov Fischer. But many let their kids be corrupted by TV, radio or video games. This is a guy who censors The Simpsons. But I think he has a point, especially about media that children absorb outside a parent’s presence. My daughter used to watch Beverly Hills 90210 (banned in the Fischer home). I’d sit in the kitchen reading the paper. When I heard something especially stupid — ours is not a sound-proofed dwelling — I’d go to the living room and rant about it.