首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
How Should Teachers Be Rewarded? We never forget our best teachers-those who inspired us with a deeper understanding or an e
How Should Teachers Be Rewarded? We never forget our best teachers-those who inspired us with a deeper understanding or an e
admin
2010-07-24
23
问题
How Should Teachers Be Rewarded?
We never forget our best teachers-those who inspired us with a deeper understanding or an enduring passion, the ones we come back to visit years after graduating, the educators who opened doors and altered the course of our lives.
It would be wonderful if we knew more about such talented teachers and how to multiply their number. How do they come by their craft? What qualities and capacities do they possess? Can these abilities be measured? Can they be taught? Perhaps above all:How should excellent teaching be rewarded so that the best teachers--the most competent, caring and compelling--remain in a profession known for low pay and low status?
Such questions have become critical to the future of public education in the U.S. Even as politicians push to hold schools and their faculty members responsible as never before for student learning, the nation faces a shortage of teaching talent. About 3.2 million people teach in U.S. public schools, but, according to an estimate made by economist William Hussar at the National Center for Education Statistics, the nation will need to recruit an additional 2.8 million over the next eight years owing to baby-boomer retirement, growing student enrollment and staff turnover (人员调整)--which is especially rapid among new teachers. Finding and keeping high-quality teachers are key to America’s competitiveness as a nation. Recent test results show that U.S. 10th-graders ranked just 17th in science among peers from 30 nations, while in math they placed in the bottom five. Research suggests that a good teacher is the single most important factor in boosting achievement, more important than class size, the dollars spent per student or the quality of textbooks and materials.
Across the country, hundreds of school districts are experimenting with new ways to attract, reward and keep good teachers. Many of these efforts borrow ideas from business. They include signing bonuses for hard-to-fill jobs like teaching high school chemistry, housing allowances and what might be called combat pay for teachers who commit to working in the most distressed schools. But the idea gaining the most motivation--and controversy--is merit pay, which attempts to measure the quality of teachers’ work and pay teachers accordingly.
Traditionally, public-school salaries are based on years spent on the job and college credits earned, a system favored by unions because it treats all teachers equally. Of course, everyone knows that not all teachers are equal. Just witness how hard parents try to get their kids into the best classrooms. And yet there is no universally accepted way to measure competence, much less the great charm of a truly brilliant educator. In its absence, policy-makers have focused on that current measure of all things educational: student test scores. In districts across the country, administrators are devising systems that track student scores back to the teachers who taught them in an attempt to assign credit and blame and, in some cases, target help to teachers who need it. Offering bonuses to teachers who raise student achievement, the theory goes, will improve the overall quality of instruction, retain those who get the job done and attract more highly qualified candidates to the profession--all while lifting those all-important test scores.
Such efforts have been encouraged by the Bush Administration, which in 2006 started a program that awards $99 million a year in grants to districts that link teacher compensation to raising student test scores. Merit pay has also become part of the debate in Congress over how to improve the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act. Last summer, Barack Obama signed merit pay at a meeting of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, so long as the measure of merit is "developed with teachers, not imposed on them and not based on some test score." Hillary Clinton says she does not support merit pay for individual teachers but does advocate performance-based pay on a schoolwide basis.
It’s hard to argue against the notion of rewarding the best teachers for doing a good job. But merit pay has a long history in the U.S., and new programs to pay teachers according to test scores have already had an opposite effect in Florida and Houston. What holds more promise is broader efforts to transform the profession by combining merit pay with more opportunities for professional training and support, thoughtful assessments of how teachers do their jobs and new career paths for top teachers.
To the business-minded people who are increasingly running the nation’s schools, there’s an obvious solution to the problems of teacher quality and teacher turnover: offer better pay for better performance. The challenge is deciding who deserves the extra cash. Merit-pay movements in the 1920s, ’50s and ’80s turned to failure just because of that question, as the perception grew that bonuses were awarded to principals’pets. Charges of unfairness, along with unreliable funding and union opposition, sank such experiments.
But in an era when states are testing all students annually, there’s a new, less subjective window onto how well a teacher does her job. As early as 1982, University of Tennessee statistician Sanders seized on the idea of using student test data to assess teacher performance. Working with elementary-school test results in Tennessee, he devised a way to calculate an individual teacher’s contribution to student progress. Essentially, his method is this: he takes three or more years of student test results, projects a trajectory (轨迹) for each student based on past performance and then looks at whether, at the end of the year, the students in a given teacher’s class tended to stay on course, soar above expectations or fall short. Sanders uses statistical methods to adjust for flaws and gaps in the data. "Under the best circumstances," he claims, "we can reliably identify the top 10% to 30% of teachers."
Sanders devised his method as a management tool for administrators, not necessarily as a basis for performance pay. But increasingly, that’s what it is used for. Today he heads a group at the North Carolina-based software firm SAS, which performs value-added analysis for North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and districts in about 15 other states. Most use it to measure schoolwide performance, but some are beginning to use value-added calculations to determine bonuses for individual teachers.
Merit-pay movements in the past didn’t succeed because ______.
选项
A、the schools couldn’t decide how much should a good teacher be paid
B、more and more schools were run by business-minded people
C、unfairness was created when deciding who should get the extra money
D、the government didn’t give enough support to the movement
答案
C
解析
该句because of和as后的内容提供了此题需寻找的原因,that question指的是第2句提到的问题:决定谁应得到额外的奖励。as引导的内容补充说到“越来越多的观点认为奖金授予了得宠于校长的人”,C是对以上分析的综合理解,符合文意,故选C。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/SlN7777K
0
大学英语四级
相关试题推荐
A、HewantedtofightagainsttheAmericans.B、HewantedtovisitGeorgeWashington.C、HewantedtodobusinesswiththeAmerican
A、Stayathome.B、Gototravelagenciesformoreinformation.C、GotoHawaiiforatravel.D、Turntootherfriendsforabetter
Menseemtohavealwaystakeaninterestinmeteorites(陨星),but【C1】______theearlynineteenthcentury【C2】______theseobjectsco
Rob8app,27,fromKent,lovedgameswhenhewasattendingschool.Infact,helovedgamessomuchthathedecidedtobecomeaP
A、Shewasdrivingalongacountryroad.B、Shewaslyingnearalonelyroad,trembling.C、Shewaslyinginahospitalbed.D、She
A、Computersandbusinesscourses.B、Coursestoearndegrees.C、Repairingcourse.D、Cookingcourse.D
A、Becauseitcomesbymail.B、Becauseitarrivesafewdaysearlier.C、Becauseitismuchcheaper.D、Becauseitisinconvenient
NowinBritain,wines____________(占四倍的空间)inthestorehouseasbothbeerandspirits.
A、Coldandwindy.B、Snowwillbereplacedbystrongwind.C、Rainyandcold.D、Itwillgetbetter.A
Daltonwonderedwhytheheavierandlightergasesintheatmospheredidnotseparateasoilandwaterdo.Hefinallyconcludedt
随机试题
注册商标连续3年停止使用的,__________可以向商标局申请撤销该注册商标,并说明有关情况。
在中性点非直接接地的系统中,如何防止谐振过电压?
【B1】【B2】
男,45岁。反酸,烧心2个月,间断胸痛,咳嗽,无吞咽困难。首先考虑的诊断是
设(X1,X2,…,Xn)是来自正态总体N(μ,σ2)的简单随机样本,其中参数μ,σ2未知,则下列各项中,不是统计量的有()。
由于车间管理不善造成的在产品的损失,应记入“管理费用”。()
《中华人民共和国教师法》是为了(),建设具有良好思想品德修养和业务素质的教师队伍,促进社会主义教育事业的发展而制定的。
将1000毫升水和1000毫升酒精混合成溶液,下列关于该溶液说法正确的是:①质量小于2000克②质量等于2000克③质量大于2000克④体积大于2000毫升⑤体积等于2000毫升⑥体积小于2000毫升
走进书房,与书对望,大千世界______,芸芸众生______。书似青山常乱叠,置身它博大的胸怀,你的思绪便如野草般疯长和______,撩起喷泉般的力量和创造,倍感生命诚可贵,知识价更高。填入画横线部分最恰当的一项是:
通常情况下,真值最好的估计值是
最新回复
(
0
)