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Some states have managed to provide gifted students with an environment conducive to free-form thinking and learning.
They have had to back off of the "tradition" of mainstreaming all students together though.

If done correctly, specialized education can be done for the same costs and generalized programs.
For one of the best (IMHO) - http://www.ncssm.edu/
Plus, who wouldn't want to go to "the School of S & M"

In case you're wondering, this school was not your average public school.

www.ncssm.edu There are a few others, but they are minor.

If you take Calculus in high school, you won't need to take Calc 1 in college. You can take the College Board's AP exams and get credit most schools will accept. Even those that don't will accept an exemption. And if you don't do well on the test, you probably
A. Didn't listen/get people's advice.
Or
Have a bad teacher, which if you go to a small school, you should have know about and prepared for in advance.

I intend to take 3 calculuses in highschool. Yes, the NC School of Science and Mathematics offers Calc 3. For free, too.

nice link, but you had a space in the url that broke it. try this one
Exhibition of High Speed Photography

Here are some pictures taken by high school students.

At my school we have full wireless coverage. Granted, it's a residential school. Are there any other high schools, residential or not, that have wireless networks on campus?

It may be "better" than Runge-Kutta, but the nice thing about techniques such as Runge-Kutta is that it is fast as well. I would guess a large number of the integration techniques in the ODEPACK package are designed not to be fast, but to be accurate. I'm so glad I took that numerical analysis course in high school...

...at NCSSM, which is right down the street from Duke. Congrats to JP to organizing this thing--great job!

It's always been cool when a post on /. is "close" to S&M, like that post awhile back about high speed photography or (*this). It's always really cool when a great institution like this one gets attention.

Is this the page you're looking for? NCSSM High Speed Photography

I'm another S&M alum, class of 2000. :)

There are no real specialized, technical, PUBLIC schools in America.

Not true. I went to a great one(NCSSM), and there are others:

IMSA

Bronx High

And I am sure there are others. There aren't many, but there are some.

don't forget NCSSM and IMSA. There really are a lot of high schools that got their .edu's early. I think I remember hearing that sometime after '95 or something that .edu would only be given to colleges and universites, and the high schools that already had .edu registrants would be grandfathered and could keep them.

My high school is talking about implementing this sort of thing. Last I checked they were claiming at start of next year. More likely later than that, but still VERY cool. Course, I'll be in college by then... Ah well.

Here at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, we have a UNIX lab run by three selected students, for whom it counts as the "work service" every student must do 3 hours a week to help the school run. Of course, our 10 or so old HP-UX machines are not terribly impressive, and we suffer from underfunding and lack of understanding from our school's IT department at times. Also the school's physics department has two computers for astrophysics data processing which I administrate, but which are only used by students who really need them. I can tell you that it does work: the key in my opinion is to keep it seperate from the main network and give students a choice of what they would like to use. That way, if something goes wrong, there are always the other public labs run by IT professionals; but if you crave some freedom to intall and run what you want, or just love Linux, you can have the option.

I work at a university which disallows towing illegally parked cars during football games. Sports teams have tons of money while departments such as english and anthropology are provided with little more than heating and air conditioning. These values are really messed up.

It doesn't have to be that way. My last two years of high school were spent at a public boarding school which emphasized education first and foremost above everything else (The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics). We still had jocks and rich kids, but the social structure was not as severe. All groups - sports, cheerleading, etc - were clubs. There were no try-outs. Everyone who wanted to join was allowed to do so with no exclusions. You could get a pin for your club to put on a letter jacket. Letter jackets were available for purchase by anyone from the student store.

Such a school is probably not the ideal solution for the US, but the over-emphasis on money and jocks has to end. The brief time I lived in Germany people had careers. Several played sports. But many people were equally interested in what books you read what art exhibitions you visited or what music you listened to.

I doubt scenes like this are going to end until the values of our society change.