Largely for "spiritual reasons," Nancy Manos started home-schooling her chil

游客2023-08-23  33

问题     Largely for "spiritual reasons," Nancy Manos started home-schooling her children five years ago and has studiously avoided public schools ever since. Yet last week, she was enthusiastically enrolling her 8-year-old daughter, Olivia, in sign language and modern dance classes at Eagleridge Enrichment—a program run by the Mesa, Ariz, public schools are taught by district teachers. Manos still wants to handle the basics, but likes that Eagleridge offers the extras, "things I couldn’t teach." One doubt, though, lingers in her mind: why would the public school system want to offer home-school families anything?
    A big part of the answer is economics. The number of home-schooled kids nationwide has risen to as many as 1.9 million from an estimated 345,000 in 1994, and school districts that get state and local dollars per child are beginning to suffer. In Maricopa County, which includes Mesa, the number of home-schooled kids has more than doubled during that period to 7,526; at about $4,500 a child, that’s nearly $34 million a year in lost revenue.
    Not everyone’s happy with these innovations. Some states have taken the opposite tack. Like about half of the states, West Virginia refuses to allow home-schooled kids to play public-school sports. And in Arizona, some complain that their tax dollars are being used to create programs for families who, essentially, eschew participation in public life. "That makes my teeth grit," says Daphne Atkeson, whose 10-year-old son attends public school in Paradise Valley. Even some committed home-schoolers question the new programs, given their central irony: they turn home-schoolers into public-school students, says Bob Parsons, president of the Alaska Private and Home Educators Association. "We’ ve lost about one third of our members to those programs. They’re so enticing."
    Mesa started Eagleridge four years ago, when it saw how much money it was losing from home-schoolers, and how unprepared some students were when they re-entered the schools. Since it began, the program’s enrolment has nearly doubled to 397, and last year the district moved Eagleridge to a strip mall(between a pizza joint and a laser-tag arcade). Parents typically drop off their kids once a week; because most of the children qualify as quarter-time students, the district collects $911 per child. "It’s like getting a taste of what real school is like," says 10-year-old Chad Lucas, who’s learning computer animation and creative writing.
    Other school districts are also experimenting with novel ways to court home schoolers. The town of Galena, Alaska,(pop. 600)has just 178 students. But in 1997, its school administrators figured they could reach beyond their borders. Under the program, the district gives home-schooling families free computers and Internet service for correspondence classes. In return, the district gets $3,100 per student enrolled in the program—$9.6 million a year, which it has used partly for a new vocational school. Such alternatives just might appeal to other districts. Ernest Felty, head of Hardin County schools in southern Illinois, has 10 home-schooled pupils. That may not sound like much—except that he has a staff of 68, and at $4,500 a child, "that’s probably a teacher’s salary," Felty says. With the right robotics or art class, though, he could take the home out of home schooling. [br] Which one of the following classes is not mentioned in the passage?

选项 A、Art class.
B、Computer animation.
C、Sign language class.
D、Pizza making class.

答案 D

解析 细节题。此题可用排除法。选项A,出现在最后一段最后一句话,“With theright robotics or art class…”;选项B,对应第四段最后一句,“who’s learning computeranimation and creative writing”;选项C,对应第一段第二句,“in sign language andmodern dance classes”。选项D是干扰项,虽然pizza在第四段出现,但指上课的地点在一家比萨饼店与一个带巨大标记的拱廊之间“between a pizza joint and alaser-tag arcade”。所以,正确选项是D。
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