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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.

admin2014-05-20  61
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.
According to recent studies, more education funding should be spent on______.
选项 A、top students
B、average students
C、overseas students
D、backward students
答案D
解析 推理题。由题干关键词recent studies和education funding定位至最后一段。该段首先介绍了各项研究的结果表明：最大的教育投资回报不是来自对中高水平学生的大笔投资，而是来自对那些落后的学生的投资。对这些学生的投资不仅可以带来可观的经济效益，也可以产生巨大的社会效益。由此可以推断，更多的教育基金应该用于培养后进生上，故选项[D]正确。
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