Education

The venerable Parent-Teachers Association has begun seeking corporate funding partnerships with companies including Coca-Cola Enterprises, Disney Interactive and Microsoft. "I know the PTA may need money, but when they accept money from whomever, it loses its independence," says parent Loretta Pleasant-Jones. "How can a PTA now turn and say, 'We want the Coke machines out of our schools?' "

At the Jesse Helms Center in North Carolina, more than a dozen earnest college students gathered for training in how to start their own conservative newspapers and opinion journals and how to pick fights with lefty bogeymen on the faculty and in student government. "By the end of the day, the student journalists were fired up for battle," writes John Johnson, "determined not only to change the tenor of notoriously liberal campus dialogues, but also, in the long run, to alter the basic makeup of the nation's professional news outlets. ...

"McTeacher's Night" has drawn criticism from some elementary school teachers in South San Francisco according to the San Francisco Chronicle. During the fast-food chain's PR event, teachers volunteer to work a three-hour shift at a McDonald's, preparing and serving food. Then the restaurant donates 20 percent of the profits to the teachers' school. "This is exploiting teachers for a real, live McDonald's commercial," one first-grade teacher told the Chronicle.

"The Department of Education is in the process of a massive overhaul of its Web site to make it easier to use and to remove outdated data -- and ensure that material on the site meshes with the Bush administration's political philosophy," reports Michelle Davis.