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  3. This weekend marks 25 years since the publication of the U. S. Department of Education’s explosive report A Nation at Risk. Its

This weekend marks 25 years since the publication of the U. S. Department of Education’s explosive report A Nation at Risk. Its

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问题     This weekend marks 25 years since the publication of the U. S. Department of Education’s explosive report A Nation at Risk. Its powerful indictment of American education launched the largest education-reform movement in the nation’s history, paving the way for strategies as different as charter schools and the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. But even after a vast political and financial investment spanning two and a half decades, we’ re far from achieving the report’ s ambitious aims.
    We’ve learned a lot about school reform in 25 years, lessons that suggest that it is possible, eventually , to achieve A Nation at Risk’s ambitious aims. We’ve learned that a lot of public schools require incentives to lift their sights for their students. The nation’s long tradition of letting local school boards set standards isn’t going to get us where we need to go educationally. If anything, NCLB’s requirement of statewide standards needs to be taken to its logical conclusion—rigorous national standards. Make them voluntary. Give states and school systems different ways of measuring their progress against the standards by sanctioning a number of different national examination boards. And reward educators for meeting the new standards (NCLB only punishes schools for not meeting state standards, which encourages states to keep standards low because they don’t want a lot of their schools labeled as failures).
    But improvement can’t merely be imposed on schools from the outside. Schools are complex social enterprises; their success depends on thousands of daily personal interactions. They are, in the end, only as good as the people in them and the culture in which those people work. So it’s crucial to get everyone in a school community invested in a school’s mission. Ownership is key. That comes from giving schools autonomy—in staffing, budgeting and instruction. From giving families a chance to choose their public schools. And from school leadership that promotes a strong sense of school identity and clear expectations of success. Reform has to come from the inside-out as well as the outside-in. There’s a human side of school reform that we ignore at our peril.
    But if achieving A Nation at Risk’s vision is becoming increasingly difficult, the alternative is really no alternative. The American economy hasn’t collapsed in the absence of public-school reform because its success is driven mainly by the small segment of the workforce that is highly educated. But the plight of the middle class that the reform reports of the 1980s warned about has worsened as the wage gap between high-school graduates and the college-educated has widened, creating an increasingly two-tiered society—and an ever-greater need to arm every American with the high-quality education that A Nation at Risk envisioned.
The third paragraph suggests that ______.
选项 A、it is important for every parent to make financial investment in schools
B、giving school enough autonomy can help to realize NCLB’s goals
C、stronger leadership in the local school boards is vital to the reform
D、NCLB’s goals are too ambitious for public schools to realize
答案B
解析 推理题。第三段第一句是本段的主题句。作者在这一段表达的主要观点是：要想提高学校教育质量，不能仅靠来自于学校外部的力量(指教育部或州教育部门)，因为学校是一个复杂的社会组织，它们成功与否取决于每大发生的各种各样的人与人之间的互动。本段最后得出结论说：教育改革的成功应该是内外因素相互作用的结果，我们不能忽视学校改革中人的因素，这样会给我们带来(失败的)危险。总之就是要给学校一定的自主权(giving school autonomy)。故B符合题意，为正确选项。
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