Last year the nation’s best-known business consulting firm ran an international survey to try to determine why certain countries

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问题     Last year the nation’s best-known business consulting firm ran an international survey to try to determine why certain countries—like Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore and South Korea—seem to have the best schools. The answer came back, somewhat unsurprisingly, that these countries have the best teachers; educators who are respected, rewarded, and held accountable for their performance in the classroom.
    This may seem obvious, but you would never have guessed watching the Democratic debate in Las Vegas the week before Thanksgiving. All the candidates give lip service to the importance of education to the nation’s future. And it goes without saying that accountability is the key to performance in any job. Yet when John Roberts of CNN asked the candidates if school boards should be able to reward teachers or fire them based on performance, all the Democrats headed for the hills, hemming and hawing and obfuscating their answers.
    What’s going on here? In short, the power of the teachers’ unions. The National Education Association is a big hitter in the Democratic Party. The NEA is all about job security, so you won’t find Democrats leading crusades to weed out bad teachers. The Republicans don’t do much better. They say they are reluctant to meddle in local school governance and instead push for vouchers so kids can go to private or parochial schools.
    In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg hired Joel Klein, a former Justice Department antitrust chief in the Clinton administration, to run the city’s chaotic schools. Klein managed to get a third of the school principals to sign an agreement that would allow them to be terminated for cause. And he got the teachers’ union to agree to give up this absurd privilege: in New York, for many years, teachers with seniority could show up at any school they wanted and teach there, shoving aside teachers with less seniority. Klein won the right to stop low-performing senior teachers from exercising this droit du seigneur. Some of them just went home rather than teaching wherever they wanted to—and were still paid in full. That doesn’t sound like an enormous step toward teacher accountability, but it was a struggle for New York to extract even these comparatively modest concessions from the teachers’ union, and it shows how far there is to go. Teacher accountability is at the heart of true education reform. If only the presidential candidates would even dare to discuss the problem.
We can conclude from Paragraph 4 that the candidates_______.

选项 A、are unwilling to tell the truth directly to the media
B、hold the view that education reform is not that necessary
C、don’t consider teacher accountability as a serious problem
D、believe that keeping out of trouble is the safest way to live

答案D

解析 推断题。最后一段主要介绍了乔尔.可莱敢于挑战教师协会的权威,突出教师责任心在教学中的重要性,在教学改革方面迈出了关键的一步。但是,那些总统候选人却为了自保,在媒体面前不敢公然与教师协会唱反调。所以作者在本文最后一句才用了虚拟的手段表示出了自己的无奈。故可推断出总统候选人“坚信明哲保身”,故[D]为答案。
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