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  3. Good teachers matter. This may seem obvious to anyone who has a child in school or, for that matter, to anyone who has been a ch

Good teachers matter. This may seem obvious to anyone who has a child in school or, for that matter, to anyone who has been a ch

admin2011-02-25  41
问题     Good teachers matter. This may seem obvious to anyone who has a child in school or, for that matter, to anyone who has been a child in school. For a long time, though, researchers couldn’t actually prove that teaching talent was important. But new research finally shows that teacher quality is a close cousin to student achievement: A great teacher can cram one-and-a-half grades’ worth of learning into a single year, while laggards are lucky to accomplish half that much.
    Yet, while we know now that better teachers are critical, flaws in the way that administrators select and retain them mean that schools don’t always hire the best.
    Failing to recognize the qualities that make teachers truly effective and to construct incentives to attract and retain more of these top performers has serious consequences. Higher salaries draw more weak as well as strong applicants into teaching — applicants the current hiring system can’t adequately screen. Unless administrators have incentives to hire the best teachers available, it’s pointless to give them a larger group to choose from. Study after study has shown that teachers with master’s degrees are no better than those without. Job experience does matter, but only for the first few years, according to research by Hoover Institution’s Eric A. Hanushek. A teacher with 15 years of experience is no more effective, on average, than a teacher with five years of experience, but which one do you think is paid more?
    This toxic combination of rigid pay and steep rewards for seniority causes average quality to decline rather than increase as teacher groups get older. Top performers often leave the field early for industries that reward their excellence. Mediocre teachers, on the other hand, are soon overcompensated by seniority pay. And because they are paid more than their skills command elsewhere, these less-capable pedagogues settle in to provide many years-of ineffectual instruction.
    So how can we separate the wheat from the chaff in the teaching profession? To make American schools competitive, we must rethink seniority pay, the value of master’s degrees, and the notion that a teacher can teach everything equally well — especially math and science — without appropriate preparation in the subject.
    Our current education system is unlikely to accomplish this dramatic rethinking. Imagine, for a moment, that American cars had been free in recent decades, while Toyotas and Hondas sold at full price. We’d probably be driving Falcons and Corvairs today. Free public education suffers from a lack of competition in just this way. So while industries from aerospace to drugs have transformed themselves in order to compete, public schooling has stagnated.
    School choice could spark the kind of reformation this industry needs by motivating administrators to hire the best and adopt new strategies to keep top teachers in the classroom. The lesson that good teachers matter should be taught, not as a theory, but as a practice.
The expression “separate the wheat from the chaff in the teaching profession” is closest in meaning to
选项 A、distinguish better teachers from less capable ones.
B、differentiate young teachers from old ones.
C、tell the essential qualities of good teaching.
D、reevaluate the role of senior teachers.
答案A
解析 推理判断题。文章第四段讲的主要是好的老师与平庸老师之间的待遇差别。好的老师由于得到的报酬不够高，所以很早就离开了教育行业。而那些平庸的老师根据资历反而工资越来越高。可见，文章是将二者进行了对比，指出教育系统存在的问题。第五段讲的是解决问题的办法。第五段的第一句是对上一段问题的过渡。因此，此句中的wheat(麦子)与chaff(麦糠)分别指代的是好老师与平庸的老师。所以本题答案为[A]。后三项均属对原文的错误理解。
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