To listen to some school reformers, you’d think there are no urban tradition

游客2023-08-20  29

问题     To listen to some school reformers, you’d think there are no urban traditional public schools that are successful. Here’s a different story, adapted and excerpted from Improbable Scholars; The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools(Oxford University Press), by David Kirp, professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He is a former newspaper editor and policy consultant, as well as the author of numerous articles in various publications and several books.
    What would it really take to give students a first-rate education? Some argue that our schools are irremediably broken and that charter schools offer the only solution. The striking achievement of Union City, N. J. —bringing poor, mostly immigrant kids into the educational mainstream—argues for reinventing the public schools we have.
    Union City makes an unlikely poster child for education reform. It’s a poor community with an unemployment rate 60 percent higher than the national average. Three-quarters of the students live in homes where only Spanish is spoken. A quarter are thought to be undocumented, living in fear of deportation.
    Public schools in such communities have often operated as factories for failure. This used to be true in Union City, where the schools were once so wretched that state officials almost seized control of them. How things have changed. From third grade through high school, students’ achievement scores now approximate the statewide average. What’s more, in 2011, Union City boasted a high school graduation rate of 90 percent—roughly 10 percentage points higher than the national average. Last year, 75 percent of Union City graduates enrolled in college, with top students winning scholarships to the Ivies.
    As someone who has worked on education policy for four decades, I’ve never seen the likes of this. After spending a year in Union City working on a book, I believe its transformation offers school districts nationwide a usable strategy.
    There’s no miracle cure, no secret sauce or Superman—just a handful of game-changing strategies, from preschool to high school, that would be familiar to any educator with a pulse. It’s a tale of continuous improvement over many years—think of it as "tortoise beats hare. " And Union City doesn’t own a patent on the formula. Across the country, from Long Beach, California to Montgomery County, Maryland, school districts big and small, well-funded and meagerly-funded, predominantly Latino and black and heterogeneous(混杂的), are boosting achievement scores and shrinking the achievement gap. Though the particulars differ, they’re all using much the same playbook. You don’t hear about these places, because the media thrives on drama and there’s nothing earthshaking to report. Patiently and steadily, these school systems are shifting the arc(弧线)of children’s lives. [br] By citing the example of Union City, N. J. , the author wants to show that______.

选项 A、students should get a first-grade education
B、public schools in urban areas are failures
C、public schools should be replaced by charter schools
D、public schools could be reformed to function well

答案 D

解析 由题干关键词example of Union City,N.J.定位到第二段第三句。该句提到,“而新泽西州的联合市所取得的显著成就——把那些贫穷的(多数为移民的)儿童带进了主流的教育体系——则为我们现有的公立学校进行彻底改革提供了有力的凭据。”因此可以推出D)“公立学校经过改革可以变得很好”符合文意,故为正确答案。
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