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  3. This weekend marks 25 years since the publication of the U. S. Department of Education’s explosive report A Nation at Risk. Its

This weekend marks 25 years since the publication of the U. S. Department of Education’s explosive report A Nation at Risk. Its

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问题     This weekend marks 25 years since the publication of the U. S. Department of Education’s explosive report A Nation at Risk. Its powerful indictment of American education launched the largest education-reform movement in the nation’s history, paving the way for strategies as different as charter schools and the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. But even after a vast political and financial investment spanning two and a half decades, we’ re far from achieving the report’ s ambitious aims.
    We’ve learned a lot about school reform in 25 years, lessons that suggest that it is possible, eventually , to achieve A Nation at Risk’s ambitious aims. We’ve learned that a lot of public schools require incentives to lift their sights for their students. The nation’s long tradition of letting local school boards set standards isn’t going to get us where we need to go educationally. If anything, NCLB’s requirement of statewide standards needs to be taken to its logical conclusion—rigorous national standards. Make them voluntary. Give states and school systems different ways of measuring their progress against the standards by sanctioning a number of different national examination boards. And reward educators for meeting the new standards (NCLB only punishes schools for not meeting state standards, which encourages states to keep standards low because they don’t want a lot of their schools labeled as failures).
    But improvement can’t merely be imposed on schools from the outside. Schools are complex social enterprises; their success depends on thousands of daily personal interactions. They are, in the end, only as good as the people in them and the culture in which those people work. So it’s crucial to get everyone in a school community invested in a school’s mission. Ownership is key. That comes from giving schools autonomy—in staffing, budgeting and instruction. From giving families a chance to choose their public schools. And from school leadership that promotes a strong sense of school identity and clear expectations of success. Reform has to come from the inside-out as well as the outside-in. There’s a human side of school reform that we ignore at our peril.
    But if achieving A Nation at Risk’s vision is becoming increasingly difficult, the alternative is really no alternative. The American economy hasn’t collapsed in the absence of public-school reform because its success is driven mainly by the small segment of the workforce that is highly educated. But the plight of the middle class that the reform reports of the 1980s warned about has worsened as the wage gap between high-school graduates and the college-educated has widened, creating an increasingly two-tiered society—and an ever-greater need to arm every American with the high-quality education that A Nation at Risk envisioned.
The U.S. Department of Education’s report____
选项 A、restated the long-term goals for American education
B、was released and made into the much acclaimed NCLB Act
C、directed its criticism at the educational system
D、accused American education of wasting federal funding
答案C
解析 细节题。第一段提到：教育部的这份报告强烈批评了美国的教育，发起了有史以来最大规模的教育改革运动。从第二段我们知道：这份报告的确是提出了一些雄心勃勃的目标(ambitious aims)，但是文章并没有告诉我们这些目标是全新的，还是对过去的目标的重述或重申(restate)，也不知道这些目标是长期目标还是短期目标。因此选项A是错误的；第一段提到：这份报告的出台为NCLB这样的改革部署铺平了道路，并没有说这份报告最终演化成了NCLB，因此选项B“发表后成为备受赞誉的NCLB法案”是错误的；第一段最后一句提到：美国虽然在政治和财政上给予了教育改革很大的支持，但效果仍然不佳。这表明，在这里作者只是说效果不佳，并无指责教育改革浪费钱的意思。
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