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  3. "If we want to become a strong economy again, the best thing we can do is have an educated workforce. "Few would object to U. S.

"If we want to become a strong economy again, the best thing we can do is have an educated workforce. "Few would object to U. S.

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问题     "If we want to become a strong economy again, the best thing we can do is have an educated workforce. "Few would object to U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s explanation of why Washington is mobilizing $100 billion to schools and universities as part of February’s giant stimulus package. Indeed, other countries are following suit, with Britain, Germany, Canada, and others making new education funding part of their anti-crisis strategies.
    What’s far less clear is that this money is going where it’s most needed—or likely to have the greatest social and economic payoff. In Germany, the bulk of nearly ￡10 billion in new school spending is being used to renovate buildings, but unlikely to have much effect on the quality of German graduates. In the United States, schools were not using the stimulus money to boost student achievement, as promised by Duncan, but to fund their general budgets. And in still other countries, governments are using money to help build new world-class universities—projects that a World Bank study in July warned risk bleeding resources away from more desperately needed areas.
    The biggest error governments are making is to blindly push for more and better everything at all levels of education; more teachers, flashier facilities, more technology in the classroom, and more elite universities. All such efforts may seem sensible, but studies show that simply spending more on education doesn’t produce better results. Kids don’t necessarily learn more if they sit in smaller classrooms, in more modern and better-equipped schools, or even if their teachers are better-paid. According to Ludger Woessmann of the IFO Institute, merely raising per student spending has zero effect on achievement. The United States, France and Germany have increased spending significantly in past decades only to see performance stagnate, while countries like Sweden and Finland have boosted quality through structural reform.
    Studies suggest another important way education policy should be refocused. They find that the largest returns on investment come not from mobilizing more money toward top or even average performers, but toward those who have been left behind. Raising the achievement of the unskilled and excluded would lead not only to individual payoffs, such as higher incomes and more meaningful lives, but also would generate big benefits for economies, such as higher productivity and greater GDP. It would also result in broad social gains—less crime, less welfare spending, and a greater sense of cohesion. "Improving our education to get the economic growth more broadly shared is the one most important thing we can do," says Benjamin Friedman, a Harvard economist. He argues that changing education in this way would be one of the few ways governments could promote both justice and economic growth—not one at the expense of the other.
The word "stagnate"(Line 8, Para. 3)most probably means______.
选项 A、to get better
B、to turn worse
C、to become unstable
D、to stop developing
答案D
解析 词汇题。根据题干提示定位至第三段。该段通过引用和举例的方式，从客观的角度分析了各国政府盲目投资教育的后果。作者引用路德格.伍兹曼的话来说明增加教育投入与提高学生水平之间不成正比，然后用美国、法国、德国的例子来证明这一观点。从本段最后一句中的onlyto可知，虽然美国、法国和德国在过去的几十年里显著地增加了教育投入，结果却没有看到教育有所发展，因此此处的stagnate应该是“停滞不前”的意思，故[D]为正确答案。
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