Helping teachers to lift student achievement more effectively has become a major theme in US education. Most efforts that are no

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问题     Helping teachers to lift student achievement more effectively has become a major theme in US education. Most efforts that are now in their early stages or being planned focus either on building the skills of teachers already in the classroom or on retaining the best and dismissing the least effective performers. The question of who should actually teach and how the nation’s schools might attract more young people from the top tier of college graduates, as part of a systematic effort to improve teaching in the United States, has received comparatively little attention.
    McKinsey’s experience with school systems in more than 50 countries suggests that there is an important gap in the US teaching. In a new report, Closing the talent gap: Attracting and retaining top-third graduates to careers in teaching, we review the experiences of the world’s top-performing systems, in Finland, Singapore, and South Korea. These countries recruit 100 percent of their teacher corps from the top third of the academic cohort. Along with strong training and good working conditions, this extraordinary selectivity is part of an integrated system that promotes the prestige of teaching—and has achieved extraordinary results. In the United States, by contrast, only 23 percent of new teachers come from the top third, and just 14 percent of new teachers who come from the top third work in high-poverty schools, where attracting and retaining talented people is particularly difficult. The report asks what it would take to emulate nations that systematically recruit top students to teaching if the United States decided that it was worthwhile to do so.
    McKinsey’s survey of nearly 1,500 top-third US college students and current teachers, highlighted in the report, shows that a major effort would be needed to attract and retain the best students to teaching. The stakes are high: recent McKinsey research found that a persistent achievement gap between US students and those in top-performing nations imposes the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession.
    Research on whether the academic background of teachers is a useful predictor of classroom effectiveness has had mixed results, and no single reform can be depicted as a silver bullet. But the success of the best-performing national systems suggests that an effort to attract the country’s top students to teaching deserves serious examination as part of a comprehensive human-capital strategy for the US education system.
What is the main idea of the passage?

选项 A、There is still a long way to go before the US can recruit the top talent in teaching.
B、Teachers with strong academic background and good working conditions make an ideal teaching system.
C、The US should learn from other countries’ experience and attract top graduates to teach.
D、More research should be made on the relationship between teachers’ academic background and students’ performance.

答案C

解析 主旨大意题。文章开篇就指出了美国在教育方面所忽视的问题,然后结合其他国家在教育方面的成功经验表明了美国与这些国家的差距所在,并且在结尾处指出,美国应该真正重视教师的学术背景了。因此,全文讨论的是美国应该努力将优秀的大学毕业生吸引到教育行业中来,[C]与之相符,故为答案。文章仅提到了美国应该开始考虑吸引优秀人才从事教育工作,而没有提到真正达成这一目标还需要多少努力,故排除[A];虽然文章第二段提到了某些国家的优秀教育体系中包括具有优秀学术背景的教师、良好的培训和优越的工作环境,但文章主要还是围绕目前美国教育中所存在的问题展开,并不是讨论理想的教育体系应该是什么样的,故排除[B];虽然文章最后一段提到目前的研究还无法确定教师的学术背景与学生的学业表现之间的联系,但这只是文章的细节,不是全文的主旨,故排除[D]。
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