Top 25 censored stories of the year. Don't miss:

2. US Schools are More Segregated Today than in the 1950s
3. Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates
4. Nuclear Waste Pools in North Carolina
10. Ecuador Declares Foreign Debt Illegitimate
15. World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco
18. Ecuador’s Constitutional Rights of Nature

Closing a few tabs.

* Scientific American considers the cognitive advantages of depression.

* Marginal Revolution has a nature/nuture post on educational outcomes in adoptees.

* Dark Stores of the American recession. More at MeFi, including the British counterpart.

* The Beatles, remastered in mono. Reviews are positive.

* ...last fall, for the first time in 15 years, Ms. McNeill, 42, did not assign “Mockingbird” — or any novel. Instead she turned over all the decisions about which books to read to the students in her seventh- and eighth-grade English classes at Jonesboro Middle School in this south Atlanta suburb.

Among their choices: James Patterson‘s adrenaline-fueled “Maximum Ride” books, plenty of young-adult chick-lit novels and even the “Captain Underpants” series of comic-book-style novels. You had me until "Captain Underpants." (via Vu)

* Smells of New York.

The difference is that in Raleigh, in 1976, the Wake County Public School system was created to zone the suburbs and inner city together to ensure a continued healthy mix of social classes.

Why there are no bad schools in Raleigh. Via Donkeylicious.

Rumor has it that Kim McLane Wardlaw (9th Circuit) may be the front-runner for the Supreme Court. You know she'd be a good justice because she's got "law" in her name. But there's also a certain poetry in this, as she wrote the lower-court brief in the case that most recently highlighted the gender imbalance on the court, Redding v. Stafford, in which the 89%-male body held that it was no big deal for a thirteen-year-old girl to be subjected to sexual humiliation from school officials in an fruitless effort to find ibuprofen on her person.

Adam Wolf, the ACLU lawyer who represents Redding, explains that “the Fourth Amendment does not countenance the rummaging on or around a 13-year-old girl’s naked body.” Wolf explains that he is arguing for a “two-step framework,” wherein schools can use a lower standard to search “backpacks, pencil cases, bookbags” but a higher standard when you “require a 13-year-old girl to take off her pants, her shirt, move around her bra so she reveals her breasts, and the same thing with her underpants to reveal her pelvic area.” This leads Justice Stephen Breyer to query whether this is all that different from asking Redding to “change into a swimming suit or your gym clothes,” because, “why is this a major thing to say strip down to your underclothes, which children do when they change for gym?”

This leads Ginsburg to sputter—in what I have come to think of as her Lilly Ledbetter voice—"what was done in the case … it wasn’t just that they were stripped to their underwear! They were asked to shake their bra out, to stretch the top of their pants and shake that out!” Nobody but Ginsburg seems to comprehend that the only locker rooms in which teenage girls strut around, bored but fabulous in their underwear, are to be found in porno movies. For the rest of us, the middle-school locker room was a place for hastily removing our bras without taking off our T-shirts.

More discussion on the very disappointing decision at Pandagon and The Paperback Museum.

Wednesday is the day I historically post links.

* It all finally makes sense; Michele Bachmann says the crazy things she says because she comes from an alternate universe where Jimmy Carter was president in 1976.

* Also in alternate-universe news: South Korean scientists claim to have cloned glowing dogs.

* Tough times in the mother country.

* They're turning Margaret Atwood's (very good) Payback into a full-length documentary about debt.

* "Crazy" Joe Biden was a key figure in the Arlen Specter party switch. Now who's laughing?

* The headline reads: "Student, 11, steps up to lead school band when budget constraints leave PS 37 without band teacher." Get this kid a scholarship anywhere he wants to go, and pour some real money into public schools already.

* The eleven most endangered historic places.

* Classic science fiction film on the Internet.

* The Bush-Obama position on state secrets takes a much-needed hit.

* The Fight Club Theory of Ferris Bueller.

* An entity passes the Hofstadter-Turing Test if it first creates a virtual reality, then creates a computer program within that reality which must finally recognise itself as an entity within this virtual environment by passing the Hofstadter-Turing Test. So now we just need to get Skynet self-aware.

Education bits:

* Kindergartener voted out of class after teacher holds public shaming. What an absurd disgrace. I sure hope the parents enjoy their inevitable million-dollar settlement.

* Twelve-year-old girl banned from local basketball league for being so much better than the boys.

My good friend Tim is running his annual fundraising drive to raise funds towards education expenses in a Nicaraguan family.

For the last couple of years, I have been raising money to help send my former host sister in rural Nicaragua to high school. This year, Iveth is set to graduate -- an AMAZING feat considering the odds a woman of her means faces -- and I am determined not only to assist her in her final year of secondary school, but also to begin raising funds for her younger sister, Joselin. Last year the department came together and raised around $450; this year I'm hoping to raise $880.

If you are interested in helping or learning more about this project, please visit my website to read about Iveth and Joselin's story:

http://ivethbetancour.blogspot.com/

Please consider donating. Schooling in Nicaragua is free; we are merely trying to raising the funds they need to cover transportation costs -- about $1.75 a day per student. A donation of $10 sends Iveth or Joselin to school for more than a week.

All the details are here...

USA Today runs that old journalistic stand-by, "Kids today don't know their [x]":

Twenty-five years after the federal report A Nation at Risk challenged U.S. public schools to raise the quality of education, the study finds high schoolers still lack important historical and cultural underpinnings of "a complete education." And, its authors fear, the nation's current focus on improving basic reading and math skills in elementary school might only make matters worse, giving short shrift to the humanities -- even if children can read and do math.

...

Among 1,200 students surveyed:

•43% knew the Civil War was fought between 1850 and 1900.

•52% could identify the theme of 1984.

•51% knew that the controversy surrounding Sen. Joseph McCarthy focused on communism.

In all, students earned a C in history and an F in literature, though the survey suggests students do well on topics schools cover. For instance, 88% knew the bombing of Pearl Harbor led the USA into World War II, and 97% could identify Martin Luther King Jr. as author of the "I Have a Dream" speech.

Fewer (77%) knew Uncle Tom's Cabin helped end slavery a century earlier.

If anything, I'm surprised these numbers are so high. One-half of teenagers can identify the theme of 1984? Really? I would have guessed a third or less.

Abstinence-only driver's ed.

Everyone is linking to this story about the British school whose ranking jumped from the bottom 25% to the top 5% after reorganizing the entire curriculum around a Harry Potter theme. I wonder if Accio theory would work on my students...

U.S. News rankings through the years. Now you can experience over two decades of the world's least meaningful survey in the privacy of your own home. Here are the '08 numbers.

When Fish suggests that we give up trying "to alter the world by forming moral character, or fashioning democratic citizens, or ... anything else," he implies that no answer is needed to the question of why, if we merely did the work before us instead of offering society something it wants, society should continue to spend good money on us. It's as if there always have been academic jobs, and there always will be jobs. So why worry? But since universities in general and literary study in particular are not self-sustaining Platonic essences but social institutions requiring a social mandate, the real question is not whether we should aim to change the world or not. Whatever our political preferences and commitments as individuals, collectively speaking we cannot afford not to make claims to some sort of social value or purpose and to back up those claims as convincingly as possible. The question that must be debated is which claims — which legitimizing statements or strategies we scholars should choose to adopt, which of these extremely different projects of change deserve or deserves our allegiance.

No honor, no degree: Students and faculty at U-Mass (Amherst) protest the awarding of a honorary degree to former Bush chief of staff Andrew Card. Warms the heart. Via MeFi.

Bill Maxwell left his job at the St. Petersburg TImes two years ago to fulfill a lifelong promise of someday teaching journalism at a historically black college. Now, disillusioned, he talks about how things turned out. Via MeFi.