“Faculty have always been less than fully satisfied about the academic seriousness of their students, but trend lines reported here reinforce the fact that colleges can be no stronger than the nation’s schools, and that public education, despite six years of reform, is still producing inadequately prepared students,’' writes Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation, in the forward of the report, The Condition of the Professoriate: Attitudes and Trends.
Making Choices
Some 3,700 students have transferred to new school districts in Minnesota in the first year of a two-year phase-in period for the state’s highly touted open-enrollment program, which allows parents to choose the school district their children attend.
The number represented a substantial increase over last year, when a total of 435 students successfully sought transfers under an earlier version of the “choice’’ program that did not mandate school district participation. Only districts enrolling 1,000 or more students were required to participate in the program this school year, but all districts will be required to allow student transfers beginning with the 1990-91 school year.
Recruiting Overseas
In an effort to prepare students to participate in a world economy, a new junior-senior high school near Denver is taking the unusual step of trying to recruit 20 percent of its students and teachers from abroad.
Gary Chesley, principal of the Eaglecrest School in Aurora, Colo., says he hopes to have an enrollment of 200 tuition-paying foreign students, most of them Japanese, when the magnet public school opens with about 1,000 students next fall.
He is working with the state education department and the one-year-old Colorado International Education Foundation to recruit the foreign students, who would probably live in a dormitory.
Sixteen schools in Japan have already expressed interest in exchanges with Eaglecrest, says Chesley, adding that the school also may recruit students from Europe and Mexico.
