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  3. Largely for "spiritual reasons," Nancy Manos started home-schooling her children five years ago and has studiously avoided publi

Largely for "spiritual reasons," Nancy Manos started home-schooling her children five years ago and has studiously avoided publi

admin2014-12-26  41
问题     Largely for "spiritual reasons," Nancy Manos started home-schooling her children five years ago and has studiously avoided public schools ever since. Yet last week, she was enthusiastically enrolling her 8-year-old daughter, Olivia, in sign language and modern dance classes at Eagleridge Enrichment—a program run by the Mesa, Ariz, public schools are taught by district teachers. Manos still wants to handle the basics, but likes that Eagleridge offers the extras, "things I couldn’t teach." One doubt, though, lingers in her mind: why would the public school system want to offer home-school families anything?
    A big part of the answer is economics. The number of home-schooled kids nationwide has risen to as many as 1.9 million from an estimated 345,000 in 1994, and school districts that get state and local dollars per child are beginning to suffer. In Maricopa County, which includes Mesa, the number of home-schooled kids has more than doubled during that period to 7,526; at about $4,500 a child, that’s nearly $34 million a year in lost revenue.
    Not everyone’s happy with these innovations. Some states have taken the opposite tack. Like about half of the states, West Virginia refuses to allow home-schooled kids to play public-school sports. And in Arizona, some complain that their tax dollars are being used to create programs for families who, essentially, eschew participation in public life. "That makes my teeth grit," says Daphne Atkeson, whose 10-year-old son attends public school in Paradise Valley. Even some committed home-schoolers question the new programs, given their central irony: they turn home-schoolers into public-school students, says Bob Parsons, president of the Alaska Private and Home Educators Association. "We’ ve lost about one third of our members to those programs. They’re so enticing."
    Mesa started Eagleridge four years ago, when it saw how much money it was losing from home-schoolers, and how unprepared some students were when they re-entered the schools. Since it began, the program’s enrolment has nearly doubled to 397, and last year the district moved Eagleridge to a strip mall(between a pizza joint and a laser-tag arcade). Parents typically drop off their kids once a week; because most of the children qualify as quarter-time students, the district collects $911 per child. "It’s like getting a taste of what real school is like," says 10-year-old Chad Lucas, who’s learning computer animation and creative writing.
    Other school districts are also experimenting with novel ways to court home schoolers. The town of Galena, Alaska,(pop. 600)has just 178 students. But in 1997, its school administrators figured they could reach beyond their borders. Under the program, the district gives home-schooling families free computers and Internet service for correspondence classes. In return, the district gets $3,100 per student enrolled in the program—$9.6 million a year, which it has used partly for a new vocational school. Such alternatives just might appeal to other districts. Ernest Felty, head of Hardin County schools in southern Illinois, has 10 home-schooled pupils. That may not sound like much—except that he has a staff of 68, and at $4,500 a child, "that’s probably a teacher’s salary," Felty says. With the right robotics or art class, though, he could take the home out of home schooling.
What can we infer from the statistics in paragraph 2?
选项 A、It is a great loss for the public school system to have so many home-schoolers.
B、The number of the home-schoolers is steadily increasing.
C、Economics is greatly influenced by so many home-schoolers.
D、Home-schooling has an incomparable advantage over the public school system.
答案A
解析 推断题。题干问，我们可以从第二段的数据推出什么结论?第二段大意是，全国在家受教育的孩子数量大幅上涨．而政府拨款给一些学区的标准是上学人数，所以学校不可避免受到损害。随后列举梅萨所在的马利柯帕县，在家受教育孩子的数量增长了两倍。达到了7 526人。按一个孩子4 500美元计算，这意味着一年所损失的收入将达到近3．4亿美元。所以，所有的数据和例子都说明了，随着在家受教育的儿童人数上涨。公立学校面临巨大损失。故正确答案是A。
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