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  3. Education Standards Are Not the Answer Sen. Christopher Dodd and Rep. Vernon Ehlers have recently proposed a bill to create

Education Standards Are Not the Answer Sen. Christopher Dodd and Rep. Vernon Ehlers have recently proposed a bill to create

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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.
Which of the following is most likely to be the title of this article?
选项 A、Education Field Should Be Turned into a Free Market.
B、The Link between Competition and Education Standards.
C、National Education Standards Are Not the Answer.
D、How to Improve American Education.
答案C
解析 本题考查文章主旨。统观全文，第一段作者引出国家课程这一话题，第二段开始对理论依据(通过高标准实现教育的高质量)进行批驳。第三、四段作者以国家标准的支持者Michael Petrilli的观点为靶子，进一步论证了自己的观点：国家标准会对教育带来极大危害，扭曲竞争，并放大错误决策的破坏作用。第五段借Jared Diamond的观点说明：教育需要多样化。最后一段得出结论：政府不应该人为地制定标准，而应该让标准在竞争中自行建立。可见，全文论证的核心是“国家教育标准不能解决问题”。所以[C]项是正确答案。[A]项内容仅在第四段提及，不能概括文章主旨。且作者只是肯定了自由教育市场的优点，并没有直接表明“应将教育领域变成一个自由市场”的观点。因此[A]不正确。[B]包括了文章的两个关键词competition，education standards，看似正确。但作者的目的并非客观表述二者之间的关系，而是借对二者关系的讨论说明国家标准的不必要性及危害性。[D]项太泛。如果主旨是“如何改善教育”，那么文章应该列举出种种改善措施，而不是仅仅停留在国家教育标准上。
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