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Two Toronto teenagers with an interest in space flight became overnight rock stars after their mission to send a Lego man into near space captured international attention.

Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad, two 17-year-old Agincourt Collegiate students, successfully sent a balloon carrying a Lego man and a small Canadian flag to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere.

The mission was more than a year in the making and was completed two weeks ago. It gained the attention of local media on Wednesday and, within 24 hours, their exploits and the awe-inspiring images they collected were being talked about across North America and mentioned as far away as Australia and Germany…

Ho and Muhammad first started sketching out their plans to send a pod into the middle stratosphere last September, working only on weekends as they balanced life as high school seniors.

Two weeks ago, the unit was attached to a helium-filled balloon and launched from a park near Ho’s east-end home, ascending 24 kilometres in 97 minutes before the balloon popped.

The Lego man and his cargo fell safely to Earth, with the help of a homemade parachute, where it landed in a field near Rice Lake, about 120 kilometres from the launch point.

The whole mission, which cost about $400, was captured by four cameras on board the shuttle and tracked by the GPS inside a phone. The astonishing photographs showed the Lego man hovering well above earth and captured glorious views of our planet from space…

Ho and Muhammad became friends in elementary school when Muhammad’s family moved to Toronto from Pakistan.

Good luck to you both.

Nikita Sachdeva – from Delhi – now a student at University of Chicago

Moulshri Mohan was an excellent student at one of the top private high schools in New Delhi. When she applied to colleges, she received scholarship offers of $20,000 from Dartmouth and $15,000 from Smith. Her pile of acceptance letters would have made any ambitious teenager smile: Cornell, Bryn Mawr, Duke, Wesleyan, Barnard and the University of Virginia.

But because of her 93.5 percent cumulative score on her final high school examinations, which are the sole criteria for admission to most colleges here, Ms. Mohan was rejected by the top colleges at Delhi University, better known as D.U., her family’s first choice and one of India’s top schools…

Mohan, 18, is now one of a surging number of Indian students attending American colleges and universities, as competition in India has grown formidable, even for the best students. With about half of India’s 1.2 billion people under the age of 25, and with the ranks of the middle class swelling, the country’s handful of highly selective universities are overwhelmed…

“The problem is clear,” said Kapil Sibal, the government minister overseeing education in India, who studied law at Harvard. “There is a demand and supply issue. You don’t have enough quality institutions, and there are enough quality young people who want to go to only quality institutions.”

American universities and colleges have been more than happy to pick up the slack. Faced with shrinking returns from endowment funds, a decline in the number of high school graduates in the United States and growing economic hardship among American families, they have stepped up their efforts to woo Indian students thousands of miles away…

Indians are now the second-largest foreign student population in America, after the Chinese, with almost 105,000 students in the United States in the 2009-10 academic year, the last for which comprehensive figures were available. Student visa applications from India increased 20 percent in the past year, according to the American Embassy here.

RTFA. A multipliplex of incompetence, political foolishness, unwillingness to see beyond your nose.

Young people capable of learning, acquiring skills and knowledge, of contributing to the betterment of society lose the opportunity. The barriers in either nation may differ. The result is the same.

Fewer than half of American eighth graders knew the purpose of the Bill of Rights on the most recent national civics examination, and only one in 10 demonstrated acceptable knowledge of the checks and balances among the legislative, executive and judicial branches, according to test results just released

At the same time, three-quarters of high school seniors who took the test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, were unable to demonstrate skills like identifying the effect of United States foreign policy on other nations or naming a power granted to Congress by the Constitution…

“The results confirm an alarming and continuing trend that civics in America is in decline,” said Charles N. Quigley, executive director of the Center for Civic Education, a nonprofit group in California. “During the past decade or so, educational policy and practice appear to have focused more and more upon developing the worker at the expense of developing the citizen.”

One bright spot was that Hispanic students, who make up a growing proportion of the country’s population and student body, narrowed the gap between their scores and those of non-Hispanic white students. On average, Hispanic eighth-graders scored 137 and non-Hispanic whites 160. That 23-point gap was down from 29 points in 2006. Among high school seniors, the gap narrowed to 19 points from 24 points.

The achievement gap between blacks and whites in civics, about 25 points at the fourth- and eighth-grade levels and 29 points among high school seniors, did not change significantly.

The results showed that a smaller proportion of fourth and eighth graders demonstrated proficiency in civics than in any other subject the federal government has tested since 2005, except history, American students’ worst subject.

“We face difficult challenges at home and abroad,” Justice O’Connor said in a statement. “Meanwhile, divisive rhetoric and a culture of sound bites threaten to drown out rational dialogue and debate. We cannot afford to continue to neglect the preparation of future generations for active and informed citizenship.”

Of course, Justice O’Connor assumes that our political parties actually would welcome an informed citizenship. I can’t imagine why.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

With one in four U.S. public school students dropping out of high school before graduation, America continues to face a dropout epidemic. Building a Grad Nation: Progress and Challenge in Ending the High School Dropout Epidemic…shows that we can end the dropout epidemic, even in schools from lower-income, urban and rural districts that many previously thought were hopeless…

The U.S. graduation rate increased from 72 percent in 2002 to 75 percent in 2008. The report reveals that the number of “dropout factory” high schools fell by 13 percent – from 2,007 in 2002 to 1,746 in 2008. While these schools represent a small fraction of all public high schools in America, they account for about half of all high school dropouts each year. Experts say targeting these high schools for improvement is a critical part of turning around the nation’s dropout rate.

More than half of all states – 29 in total – increased their statewide graduation rate from 2002 to 2008.

The state of Tennessee and New York City led the nation by boosting graduation rates 15 percent and 10 percent, respectively.

Most of the decline in dropout factories – 216 of the 261 – occurred in the South.

Just as Secretary of State George C. Marshall launched a plan to rebuild Europe after World War II, we must rebuild our broken school system. We are launching a “Civic Marshall Plan,” comprising policymakers, educators, business leaders, community allies, parents and students to address the dropout epidemic by focusing on the dropout factory high schools and their feeder elementary and middle schools. In tune with the call from President Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan earlier this year to increase the U.S. graduation rate to 90 percent by 2020, we are working to mobilize Americans to quicken the pace. To reach these national goals, the graduation rate must rise by an average of 1.5 percentage points per year over the next decade. The Civic Marshall Plan outlines the benchmarks to ensure the attainment of those goals, and focuses on the strategic deployment of human resources to help school districts and states accelerate improvement.

Please, please read the report [.pdf]. There is little hope for improvement in any and all aspects of life in this land without leadership from an educated citizenry.

Time to get off your rusty dusties, folks.

Whew! It could have turned out to be something like this.

Police in Ohio said a high school was locked down for about a half hour due to the sound that resulted when a squirrel caused a transformer malfunction.

Columbus police said Brookhaven High School was locked down shortly after 8 a.m. Monday following the gunshot-like sound but the lockdown was lifted shortly after 8:30 a.m., when investigators discovered the sound was caused by the squirrel, WCMH-TV, Columbus, Ohio, reported Tuesday.

I’d hate to think what happens when some dizzy blond pops her bubble gum in class.

What’s appropriate – after you leave high school

Jassundra Barnett says what her son did in chorus class was “silly.” But she doesn’t think it is a matter for the police and the criminal courts. And she doesn’t think his teacher should take the fall.

Jerramy Barnett was one of three male students at Southwest DeKalb High School near Atlanta who performed a provocative dance in chorus class in 2008…

No one disputes the sexual nature of the boys’ dance routine, which was widely viewed by students and faculty members on a student’s Facebook page. What is in dispute is whether it was a crime.

On Monday, just before a jury was chosen at Grigsby’s trial on charges of contributing to the corruption of minors, prosecutors announced they had filed public indecency charges against the three male students, including Jerramy Barnett.

His mother told CNN by telephone Monday night that the charges against her son, now a 19-year-old high school graduate who works in a church music program, are unwarranted.

“The charges were brought against him to intimidate him into not testifying for Mr. Grigsby,” she said. “If not, why did they wait 16 months, until the morning of the trial, to charge them?”

Read the rest of this entry »

A dozen years into the “1 to 1″ computing movement’s push to pair every schoolchild and teacher with a laptop, studies show the students in these programs outperformed their peers in traditional classrooms, according to researchers.

Students who have participated in 1:1 computing report higher achievement and increased engagement, according to findings of studies published in a special issue of the Journal of Technology, Learning and Assessment, published by Boston College’s Lynch School of Education.

The journal’s January 2010 edition represents the first-ever collection of peer-reviewed research articles examining the impacts of providing every teacher and student their own laptop computer in school — typically known as “1:1 computing…”

Damian Bebell said that across all of the studies contained in the journal, one common link is clear: the value of teachers committed to making 1:1 computing work.

All of the studies that examined the impact of 1:1 computing on student achievement found that students in the 1:1 settings outperformed their traditional classroom peers on English/Language Arts standardized tests by a statistically significant margin. Study authors also reported on evidence of increased student motivation and engagement, as well as changes in teachers’ instructional practices.

Any geeks surprised?

Winchester police say William Poole, 18, was taken into custody Tuesday morning. Investigators say they discovered materials at Poole’s home that outline possible acts of violence aimed at students, teachers, and police.

Poole told LEX 18 that the whole incident is a big misunderstanding. He claims that what his grandparents found in his journal and turned into police was a short story he wrote for English class.

“My story is based on fiction,” said Poole, who faces a second-degree felony terrorist threatening charge. “It’s a fake story. I made it up. I’ve been working on one of my short stories, (and) the short story they found was about zombies. Yes, it did say a high school. It was about a high school over ran by zombies.”

Even so, police say the nature of the story makes it a felony. “Anytime you make any threat or possess matter involving a school or function it’s a felony in the state of Kentucky,” said Winchester Police detective Steven Caudill.

A judge raised Poole’s bond from one to five thousand dollars after prosecutors requested it, citing the seriousness of the charge.

We already know Kentucky is run by nutballs. The kid should disavow his grandparents. Or write stories about schools captured by angels.

Thanks, Mr. Justin

There is no drug problem at Westlake Boys High School, says its headmaster Craig Monaghan.

He is defending the school after a two-week investigation found 12 year 10 pupils using or dealing cannabis. The pupils were excluded from the school for “gross misconduct”.

Mr Monaghan guarantees there are no more Westlake students using drugs in school. “I’m 100 percent certain there are no drugs left in the school…

North Shore police area commander inspector Les Paterson says It is almost impossible to prevent students getting drugs into schools. “What can we do – set up border patrols?

Schools need to rely on education, common sense and good parenting to stop drugs problems, he says.

“It would be draconian and bizarre to go down the route they have in the United States where you basically get searched on your way in.

The copper’s brain is closer to Earth than the headmaster, of course.

I have to wonder what sort of education the school provides about sex – in light of their fascination with Zero Tolerance.

Thanks, K B