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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.
One of the reform measures of NCLB is to ______.
选项 A、entitle states to set their own education standards
B、entitle the Department of Education to set national standards
C、make statewide standards voluntary rather than compulsory
D、allow local school boards to set standards to suit student needs
答案A
解析 局部主题题(例证题)。第二段提到：美国长久以来一直让当地教育部门设定标准，这种传统做法不会帮助我们实现教育的目标。改革后，NCLB仍要求各州制定自己的教育标准。可见，NCLB要求的是各州制定自己的标准，至于说这些标准needs to be taken to its logical conclusion—rigorous national standards，这只是作者认为的合理推论，并不是NCLB的要求。故A符合题意，为正确选项。
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