Internet use is OK during Australian exams

Top News - Digital debate: Prepare kids for exams or life?

Students at Presbyterian Ladies College (PLC), a private girls' school in Sydney, Australia, are participating in a pilot project in which they can use cell phones, the internet, and can even call a friend or relative to help them with an exam question.

Learning environments make a difference in math

Girls love math, too!  Please be sure to praise them for it.

A recent report

... found that while girls can be just as talented as boys at mathematics, some are driven from the field because they are teased, ostracized or simply neglected.

Buzz, Buzz.

Bees Can Count - Yahoo! News

Honeybees are clever little creatures. They can form abstract concepts, such as symmetry versus asymmetry, and they use symbolic language - the celebrated waggle dance - to direct their hivemates to flower patches. New reports suggest that they can also communicate across species, and can count - up to a point.

Blu-Ray? How about Bug-Ray?

News in Science - DVD uses bug protein to store data - 07/07/2006

DVDs coated with a layer of protein could one day hold so much information that storing data on your computer hard drive will be obsolete, says a US-based researcher.

An entire generation will have no frame of reference for Dan Aykroyd's character in Trading Places

Starting a New Era at Goldman and Morgan - NYTimes.com

The transformation of Wall Street picked up pace on Monday as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the last big independent investment banks, moved to restructure into larger, less risk-taking organizations that will be subject to far greater regulation by the Federal Reserve.

No purses in class.

Indiana school bans purses in the classroom - ParentDish

In an effort to keep kids as safe as possible, many schools have banned backpacks in the classroom, forcing students to keep them in their lockers instead. But an Indiana high school is taking that idea one step further, telling female students that they can't carry their purses either. And that new rule has girls and parents alike upset.

Dropout statistics

Visit LeaderTalk: Dropped Out or Pushed Out? to get the citation sources for each statistic.

Every nine seconds a student becomes a drop-out [1].

Of those who graduate from high school, the completion rate is 72% for females and 64% for males [2].

Among ethnic groups: African-Americans have a 50% graduation rate; Latinos - 53%; Asian/Pacific Islanders - 77%; and Whites - 75% [3].

Students from low-income families drop-out at six times the rate of higher-income families [4].

75% of inmates in state prisons are drop-outs. 59% of inmates in Federal prisons are drop-outs [5].

55% of drop-outs are employed [6].

The U.S. death rate for people with less than 12 years of education is 2.5 times higher than those with 13 or more years of education [7].

The cost to the public for crime and welfare involving drop-outs is $24 BILLION annually [8].

There are 3.5 million drop-outs between the ages of 16 - 25 [9].

Total combined loss of income and taxes in one year due to drop-outs equals $192 BILLION (1.6% of the Gross Domestic Product) [10].

Arguments about our pluralistic attempt to educate all children notwithstanding - graduations rates around the world include the following: Denmark - 96%; Japan - 93%; Poland - 92%; Italy 79%; and the U.S. - 70% [11].