According to early projections, Mr Schroder’s party lost control of at least one of the two regional assemblies up for grabs in yesterday’s poll, and was running neck and neck with the Christian Democrats in the second.
The winners of the day were clearly the DVU, a party without any membership to speak of, bankrolled by the right-wing publisher Gerhard Frey who had spent 2.5million German marks (pounds 870,000) to flood the eastern Land of Brandenburg which surrounds Berlin with xenophobic leaflets and posters. His investment was rewarded with a 5.7 per cent share of the vote, which gives him a new foothold in the fragile parliamentary democracy in the east, after a whopping 13 per cent gained in Saxony-Anhalt last year.Mr Frey’s latest success, if anything, conceals the depth of sympathy for his cause. THE RACIST German People’s Union, DVU, swept yesterday into a second regional assembly in the east, as disaffected voters deserted Chancellor Gerhard Schroder’s Social Democrats. “But is it ethical for community leaders to buy and sell our students’ attention? Are we going to treat our students as commodities we can barter in exchange for resources, or treat them as precious resources themselves?”. That’s why companies want to get into schools,” Mr Hagelshaw said. According to Mr Hagelshaw, school districts rarely make their negotiations with private companies known to parents and teachers.

San Jose had been talking to Pepsi for a year, but local papers only reported it days before the signing.His group argues the deals are detrimental to schools even in financial terms, because taxpayers still pay for the time in which students are being bombarded by private advertising. Academic researchers recently calculated that Channel One costs US taxpayers $1.8bn a year.”All these things are taking advantage of a captive audience. “If not checked, it would have expanded to other companies and other books.”But a second bill introduced in California recently, which would have banned classroom television and most other forms of advertising in schools, ran into a wall of resistance after Channel One hired a powerful lobbying firm.The bill now sitting on the desk of the Governor, Gray Davis, for consideration is heavily watered down, merely mandating public hearings before schools can buy Channel One’s services. It was a trend that was just starting,” said Andrew Hagelshaw of the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education, a national non-profit campaign group.

Some 150 schools and school districts have exclusive drinks contracts in what is rapidly turning into a turf war between Pepsi and Coca-Cola, neither of them noted for the nutritional or health values of their products. New York, which bans exclusive Coca-Cola contracts, is considering a similar measure.”We’re ecstatic [about the California textbook ban] because it’s an important precedent. The state of California has just passed a law banning product placement in school textbooks – dealing a severe blow to the fortunes of the McGraw Hill maths book, since California is the single largest education market in the country. One Georgia teenager who wore a Pepsi shirt to his school’s Coke Day last year was suspended for insubordination.A backlash against this trend is beginning to take shape, however. The station provides 10 minutes of programming, including two minutes of compulsory advertising, as the price for free television and video equipment.Its computer equivalent, a company called ZapMe!, provides free hardware but obliges schools to use its machines for four hours each day and expose children to adverts.Advertising in US schools is reaching epidemic proportions.