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  3. Almost everyone who worries about America’s "competitiveness" in the world sighs for the sorry state of U. S. K-12 education. Fr

Almost everyone who worries about America’s "competitiveness" in the world sighs for the sorry state of U. S. K-12 education. Fr

admin2013-09-16  16
问题     Almost everyone who worries about America’s "competitiveness" in the world sighs for the sorry state of U. S. K-12 education. From President Obama to CEOs, the refrain is to "fix the schools", almost as if it were an engineering problem. "The urgency for reform has never been greater, "Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently wrote in The Washington Post. The diagnosis spans the political spectrum. But what if it’s not true?
    There are grounds for doubt. For starters, economic competitiveness depends on more than good schools, which are important but not decisive. To take an obvious example: The Japanese have high test scores, but Japan’s economy languishes. Its export-led growth has collapsed. Next—and as important—American schools are better than they’re commonly portrayed. We now have a massive study of the reading abilities of 15-year-olds in 65 systems worldwide showing that U. S. schools compare favorably with their foreign counterparts.
    However, the overall scores don’t tell the full story. The U. S. Education Department examined the American scores by race and ethnicity. This report allows comparison with countries whose ethnic and racial compositions are more homogeneous than ours. For example. you can compare the scores of white non-Hispanic Americans with the scores from Canada, a country that is almost 85 percent white. This is an admittedly crude approach, but it suggests that U. S. schools do about as well as the best systems elsewhere in educating similar students.
    American schools are hardly perfect. Math scores, though showing the same pattern, are lower than reading scores. We can learn from other countries better ways to teach math. But the most glaring gap is well-known: the stubbornly low test scores of blacks and Hispanics. Changing this is the great challenge for schools, because the share of black and Hispanic students is growing. It was 23 percent in 1980, 35 percent in 2009.
    Americans have an extravagant faith in the ability of education to solve all manner of social problems. In our mind’s eye, schools are engines of progress that create opportunity and foster upward mobility. To the contrary, these persistent achievement gaps demonstrate the limits of schools to compensate for problems outside the classroom—broken homes, street violence, indifference to education—that discourage learning and inhibit teaching. As child-psychologist Jerome Kagan points out, a strong predictor of children’s school success is the educational attainment of their parents. The higher it is, the more parents read to them. inform and encourage them.
    For half a century, successive waves of "school reform" have made only modest headway against these obstacles. It’s an open question whether the present "reform" agenda, with its emphasis on teacher accountability, will do better. What we face is not an engineering problems it’s overcoming the legacy of history and culture. The outcome may affect our economic competitiveness less than our success at creating a just society.  
What is the best way to deal with people’s worry according to Arne Duncan?
选项 A、Protest the depressing state of U. S. education.
B、Make some changes in American schools.
C、Fix and improve all the school buildings.
D、Treat the school reform as a political issue.
答案B
解析 根据题干关键词worry和Arne Duncan定位到第一段第三句；“The urgency for reform has never been greater，”Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently wrote in The Washington Post．可知，Arne Duncan认为改革迫在眉睫。所以B)项正确。
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