"Armed with a $3 million Texas Title I Priority Schools grant, Belton Independent School District in Texas will open the doors to an innovative high school concept this fall," writes Bridget McCrea in THE Journal. Belton New Tech High School at Waskow will combine technology and project-based learning to create a learning environment that principal Stan Whittle hopes will entice students to "take ownership of their educations and their futures."

The new school is part of the New Tech Network, which was founded in Napa, California, in 1996, and now includes 62 public high schools in 14 states. To learn more, read the full article.

That time-honored anti-cheating mantra, “You’re only hurting yourself,” may be literal fact, according to new research. Emerging evidence suggests students who cheat on a test are more likely to deceive themselves into thinking they earned a high grade on their own merits, setting themselves up for future academic failure.

In four experiments detailed in the March Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the Harvard Business School and Duke University found that cheaters pay for the short-term benefits of higher scores with inflated expectations for future performance. To learn more about the results of the study, read the full article by Sarah D. Sparks at Education Week.

"A report released on March 22 has good news for those working at improving the graduation rate in America's schools–an effort that has received significant attention only for the past decade or so," writes Amanda Paulson in The Christian Science Monitor.

The number of “dropout factory” high schools–those graduating 60 percent or less of their students–stood at 1,634 in 2009, according to the report, which was released by America’s Promise Alliance, Civic Enterprises, and Johns Hopkins University’s Everyone Graduates Center. This represented a decrease from 1,746 in 2008 and from a high of 2,007 in 2002.

To learn more about the decrease in "dropout factories," read the full article.

The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) recently held a webcast formally releasing Student Learning, Student Achievement: How Do Teachers Measure Up?, a report outlining effective methods of using student learning as a measure of teacher effectiveness.

The report––developed by an independent, expert task force convened by NBPTS––provides guidance to educators and policymakers about effective ways to link student learning and teacher evaluation. To access the full report and view the webcast, visit this page on the NBPTS website.

A report by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop finds that while children's use of mobile media devices and computers is on the rise, television is still their primary media source. Entitled Always Connected: The New Digital Media Habits of Young Children, the report was done to better understand the evolving patterns of younger children’s media use and draws on previous studies as well as new data. A PDF is available for free download here.