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
84
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.
The annual tests for students bring a new,______way to measure the teaching quality.
选项
答案
less subjective
解析
此处需填人形容同性成分,修饰way题于中的way to measure the teaching quality是对该句window onto how well a teacher does her job的同义替换,原文的new,less subjective并列修饰该部分内容,据此可知此处需填与new并列的less subjective。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/clN7777K
0
大学英语四级
相关试题推荐
Wefindthatbrightchildrenarerarelyheldbackbymixed-abilityteaching.Onthecontrary,boththeirknowledgeandexperienc
Wefindthatbrightchildrenarerarelyheldbackbymixed-abilityteaching.Onthecontrary,boththeirknowledgeandexperienc
A、HewantedtofightagainsttheAmericans.B、HewantedtovisitGeorgeWashington.C、HewantedtodobusinesswiththeAmerican
A、Toplaygameswiththem.B、Tohelpsolvetheirpsychologicalproblems.C、Tosendtheytothehospital.D、Tomakethemawareof
Iaskedsuccessfulpeoplewhatthesecretoftheirsuccesswas.I【B1】______anearlydiscussionwithavicepresidentofalarge
ChildAbuseDefinitionofChildAbuseChildabuseisalsocalledcrueltytochildren,whichisthepurposefulinfliction
Menseemtohavealwaystakeaninterestinmeteorites(陨星),but【C1】______theearlynineteenthcentury【C2】______theseobjectsco
AneweraisuponU.S.Callitwhatyouwill:theserviceeconomy,theinformationage,theknowledgesociety,Inalltranslates
Haveyoueverconsideredwhatanimportantpartworkplaysinourgenerallifestyle?Formostofus,ourjobsarethemainthing
A、Themanwilldrivethewomantoschool.B、Themanhasfinishedhisassignment.C、Themaniswillingtohelpthewoman.D、Them
随机试题
意识是人脑的机能,只要有健康的大脑就会有正常的人的意识。()
在下列传染病中罕见有病原携带者的是
外感风寒湿邪,症见恶寒发热头痛,肌表无汗,肢体酸楚疼痛,口苦而渴者,治宜选用()素体气虚,内有痰饮,外感风寒,症见恶寒发热,无汗,头痛鼻塞,咳嗽痰白,胸膈满闷,倦怠无力,气短懒言,苔白脉弱者,治宜选用()
崩漏的主要病机是()
关于屋面坡度设计,以下说法错误的是:
丙公司只生产L产品,计划投产一种新产品,现有M、N两个品种可供选择,相关资料如下:资料一:L产品单位售价为600元,单位变动成本为450元,预计年产销量为2万件。资料二:M产品的预计单价为1000元,边际贡献率为30%,年产销量为2.2万件,开发M产品
夏夜里的萤火虫是一道亮丽的风景线6萤火虫为什么会发光呢?这是由于它们体内的化学反应引起的,也就是所谓的生物体发光。灯发光时会产生大量的热,但萤火虫不会,它发出的是“冷光”。因为如果它的发光器官也像灯泡那样热,这种昆虫在发光过程中就无法存活。萤火虫发光有很多
根据以下资料回答下列题。AO级型车比A00级型车在过去的五年中每年平均销售份额约高出()。
下列选项中,不属于全国人大常委会职权的是()。
AccordingtoAmericanfederalgovernment,residentsofHawaiihavethelongestlife______:77.2years.
最新回复
(
0
)