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  3. Almost everyone who worries about America’s "competitiveness" in the world sighs for the sorry state of U. S. K-12 education. Fr

Almost everyone who worries about America’s "competitiveness" in the world sighs for the sorry state of U. S. K-12 education. Fr

admin2013-09-16  8
问题     Almost everyone who worries about America’s "competitiveness" in the world sighs for the sorry state of U. S. K-12 education. From President Obama to CEOs, the refrain is to "fix the schools", almost as if it were an engineering problem. "The urgency for reform has never been greater, "Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently wrote in The Washington Post. The diagnosis spans the political spectrum. But what if it’s not true?
    There are grounds for doubt. For starters, economic competitiveness depends on more than good schools, which are important but not decisive. To take an obvious example: The Japanese have high test scores, but Japan’s economy languishes. Its export-led growth has collapsed. Next—and as important—American schools are better than they’re commonly portrayed. We now have a massive study of the reading abilities of 15-year-olds in 65 systems worldwide showing that U. S. schools compare favorably with their foreign counterparts.
    However, the overall scores don’t tell the full story. The U. S. Education Department examined the American scores by race and ethnicity. This report allows comparison with countries whose ethnic and racial compositions are more homogeneous than ours. For example. you can compare the scores of white non-Hispanic Americans with the scores from Canada, a country that is almost 85 percent white. This is an admittedly crude approach, but it suggests that U. S. schools do about as well as the best systems elsewhere in educating similar students.
    American schools are hardly perfect. Math scores, though showing the same pattern, are lower than reading scores. We can learn from other countries better ways to teach math. But the most glaring gap is well-known: the stubbornly low test scores of blacks and Hispanics. Changing this is the great challenge for schools, because the share of black and Hispanic students is growing. It was 23 percent in 1980, 35 percent in 2009.
    Americans have an extravagant faith in the ability of education to solve all manner of social problems. In our mind’s eye, schools are engines of progress that create opportunity and foster upward mobility. To the contrary, these persistent achievement gaps demonstrate the limits of schools to compensate for problems outside the classroom—broken homes, street violence, indifference to education—that discourage learning and inhibit teaching. As child-psychologist Jerome Kagan points out, a strong predictor of children’s school success is the educational attainment of their parents. The higher it is, the more parents read to them. inform and encourage them.
    For half a century, successive waves of "school reform" have made only modest headway against these obstacles. It’s an open question whether the present "reform" agenda, with its emphasis on teacher accountability, will do better. What we face is not an engineering problems it’s overcoming the legacy of history and culture. The outcome may affect our economic competitiveness less than our success at creating a just society.  
The study of reading abilities in 65 systems was used by the author to show
选项 A、economic competitiveness relies on more than good schools
B、how American schools are usually portrayed
C、why American schools have failed economic competitiveness
D、American schools are as good as other best systems in the world
答案D
解析 根据题干关键词the study of reading abilities in【C4】______systems定位到文章第二段最后两句：Next--and as important--…U．S．schools compare favorably with their foreign counterparts．第二段主要讲述人们产生怀疑的依据。由For starters…和Next…可以得知，这里讲述了两条怀疑的依据。“65种制度下阅读能力的调查”是在讲第二条依据的时候提到的．所以是用来说明：American schools are better than they’re commonly portrayed．所以，D)项符合题意。
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