Time To Treat Teachers As Rock Stars? High Pay Offered At NYC Charter School ExcitesTeachers

I’ve written before about the idea that paying superstar teachers top salaries and skimping on the frills might be the very best way to get kids learning and teachers grinning.
This article in the New York Times shares the story of a former Teach for America participant who is starting a charter school in NYC for [...]

Big Bubble of High School Students About To Burst

This bit, taken from Higher Ed Watch’s blog, gives us a heads up on the way high schools in the US will be changing in the years ahead:
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Changes Ahead in Future Applicant Pool
The demographic boom in college bound students that began in the early 1990s is coming to the end this year, according to a new [...]

High School Teachers On Hidden (Cell Phone) Cameras

I’m all in favor of using cell phones as learning devices (there are cool ways to do this) but that’s not all they’re being used for in high school classrooms.
 Over at Dangerously Irrelevant, you can ( if you have the stomach for it) watch seven student-filmed YouTube videos of teachers losing it in class. Of course, [...]

Mini-Term: An Experiment In No-Pressure, For-Its-Own-Sake Learning

This post by Anthony Chivetta, one of the students over at Students 2.0 provides a glimpse of the kind of learning experiences that are surprisingly simple but result in a great deal of both real learning and satisfaction. 
He describes a mini-term in which two or three teachers with a shared passion teamed up to offer a short course [...]

High School Depression–or Meaning Crisis? Eric Maisel Shares Tips For Students Seeking Relevance

For more than 25 years, Eric Maisel (the godfather of creativity training) has been looking at the realities of the creative life and the make-up of the creative person in books like Fearless Creating, Creativity for Life, Coaching the Artist Within, and lots of others.
In The Van Gogh Blues, Eric explores the idea that meaning [...]

How to Take Advantage of the College Application Frenzy

According to this article in The New York Times,  colleges are being inundated by applications from those seeking a coveted spot in the Class of 2012. 
The big bulge of baby-boomers’ kids, coupled with increases in the percentage of high school seniors who are heading to college, means most universities are seeing unprecedented numbers of applications. 
But there’s another element that [...]

Overachievers Are Average: The NEW Way For High School Students to Get Attention

One of the blogs I enjoy reading these days (among many) is Student 2.0.  Recently, I read a post by a senior in high school named Stacy called “Average Just Doesn’t Cut It Anymore” in which she gives us a look at her own long list of accomplishments and lets us know that she’s practically [...]

Online Learning vs Homeschooling: A Little Clarity

There’s been a lot of buzz about the differences between online learning and homeschooling thanks to a recently-aired episode of “Supernanny” in which two high school girls taking online courses end up enrolling in a traditional school due to concerns about the quality of their educational experience.  Read more here. 
It’s important to understand that homeschooling [...]

A New/Old Kind Of Blending: Districts Consider Combined Middle/High Schools

According to this article in The Examiner, some districts are implementing a twist on the old one-room school house:  combining middle school and high school in one building.
The 6-12 model has its pluses and minuses.  The pluses for urban schools facing high drop-out rates:  getting kids in the same building as high schoolers means more time [...]

Apologies to Montpelier High School: When School Rankings Are Wrong, Faces Turn Red

Oops!  It seems the recent ranking of a high school in Vermont as #5 in the nation in US News and World Report’s annual stat-n-status fest has turned embarrassing.
The ones responsible for the numbers in the report made a mistake.  The school administrators at Montpelier High School in Montpelier, Vermont discovered the mistake and alerted the magazine. 
For a while [...]