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  3. Accountability for Education Fails I have an uncle who was for years a Chicago public school teacher. Passionate and articul

Accountability for Education Fails I have an uncle who was for years a Chicago public school teacher. Passionate and articul

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问题                     Accountability for Education Fails
    I have an uncle who was for years a Chicago public school teacher. Passionate and articulate about his subject, biology, Amie eared a great deal about whether the kids learned in his class.
    But here’s the disturbing thing he recalls about his career: In the years that his classes were filled with kids from poor, broken homes who didn’t eat or sleep with any regularity, he worried that he wasn’t nearly as effective as he wanted to be. He reached some of the kids, sometimes, with some material, but not enough to his liking, no matter what he did or how hard he tried.
    When he changed schools and suddenly was teaching kids from middle-class families who valued education, he instantly became a brilliant teacher. His students progressed at a fast clip, and everything he did seemed to work.
    What some school reformers seem to forget is that the kids’ circumstances outside school affect their class performance: how much they eat, how much they sleep, how many words they heard when they were young, how many books were made available to them, the abilities and the disabilities with which they were born, etc.
    What happens in the classroom is incredibly powerful, but it is not the only thing that matters.
    This is why it was so disheartening to hear President Obama wade into a debate about last week’s firing of all of the educators at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island.
    The firings by the Central Falls school trustees made big headlines, not because reconstituting a school is new, but perhaps because it is the only school in the state’s poorest and smallest city, and because it was not reported as being the consequence of years of calculated efforts to fix the school (even if it was).
    Education Secretary Arne Duncan immediately applauded the move, saying the committee members were "showing courage and doing the right thing for kids". And today, Obama felt the need to jump in, saying in a speech: "So if a school is struggling, we have to work with the principal and the teachers to find a solution. We’ve got to give them a chance to make meaningful improvements. But if a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn’t show signs of improvement, then there’s got to be a sense of accountability."
    "And that’s what happened in Rhode Island last week at a chronically troubled school, when just 7 percent of 11 th graders passed state math tests—7 percent. When a school board wasn’t able to deliver change by other means, they voted to lay off the faculty and the staff. As my Education Secretary Arne Duncan, says, "our kids get only one chance at an education, and we need to get it right."
    One thing that Obama got right: the school board wasn’t able to deliver change, but, unfortunately, the school board didn’t fire itself. It fired all the administrators and teachers, as if they were the only things responsible for student failure.
    I wish someone would tell Obama the truth about school restructuring.
The word "disheartening" in Paragraph 7 has a similar meaning to______.
选项 A、indifferent
B、furious
C、scared
D、frustrated
答案D
解析 语义理解题。根据题干关键词disheartening定位到第七段。该段开始是文章内容的转折，从作者叔叔的例子转入了对奥巴马发言的讨论，因此这个表达作者情绪的词应根据后文讨论的基调做判断。故[D]为正确选项。从后文可知，作者对总统的论调持批判态度，由此排除[A]和[C]；全文并没有出现激烈的字眼，一直都是运用讽刺，故排除[B]。
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