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Education Standards Are Not the Answer Sen. Christopher

游客2024-12-16  32
问题                     Education Standards Are Not the Answer
    Sen. Christopher Dodd and Rep. Vernon Ehlers have recently proposed a bill to create a national curriculum in reading and math. The bill’s supporters rightly tell us that by the end of high school, American students have fallen behind their international peers. Dodd and Ehlers use that observation to conclude that we need such a curriculum "to compete in the global economy." But how exactly would homogenizing our curriculum and testing make us more competitive? "National standards would help propel U.S. economic competitiveness, because they would allow the country to set expectations higher than those of our international competitors," write Rudy Crew and Paul Vallas, the superintendents of the Miami and Philadelphia school districts, in a recent Education Week commentary.
    This idea of higher standards has a certain appeal. In many other areas of life, higher standards are associated with better performance. It’s much harder to qualify for a U. S. Olympic team than for a typical high school sports team—and Olympic teams are demonstrably better. Japanese automakers generally set higher reliability standards in the 1970s than did American automakers, and they produced more reliable vehicles. But sports and manufacturing are competitive fields, while public schooling currently is not. Standards advocates mistakenly assume that high external standards produce excellence, but in fact it is the competitive pursuit of excellence that produces high standards.
    Michael Petrilli, a scholar at the Ford-ham Foundation, recognizes the role of competition in education, but contends that national standards are necessary to facilitate it. In order for any market to work effectively, Petrilli claims, "consumers need good information," and in his view, that information can only be delivered by a national system of standards and tests.
    Yet around the world, free education markets are already thriving with no such standards in place. One such market exists in the United States: after-school tutoring. By contrast, there is no evidence that imposing government standards improves the performance of true education markets. On the contrary, by placing all intellectual eggs in the same basket, a single national curriculum would hamper competition and magnify the damage done by every bad decision.
    As Jared Diamond so compellingly argued in his Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs , and Steel, diversity is as important to the health of human societies as it is to the survival of ecosystems. We need education diversity as much as we need biodiversity. A dynamic, competitive system is better able to survive mishaps than a monolithic, centralized one.
    It is ironic that standards advocates urge us to improve our schools in response to competitive pressures from abroad, but then discount the ability of the same competition and consumer choice to drive improvement at home. It is the competitive pursuit of excellence spurred by market forces that drives up standards, not the other way around. The sooner we realize that, the better off our children will be. [br] According to Michael Petrilli, national education standards can______.
选项 A、make the negative competition avoided
B、make schools more competitive
C、make education market more competitive
D、make sure consumers have a wide range of choices
答案 C
解析 本题考查文中人物观点。由题干定位到第三段。Michael Petrilli的认识分为两部分：I)竞争对教育有促进作用；2)制定国家标准能促进其作用的发挥。由此可知[C]正确。Michael Petrilli根本没有提到不良竞争，[A]错误。他强调的是国家标准能“促进教育领域”的竞争，而不是“增强各个学校的竞争力”，[B]错误。该段最后一句只是笼统地说国家标准会给消费者提供一些有用信息，并没有介绍起作用的具体方面，[D]过度引申。
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