Good teachers matter. This may seem obvious to anyone who has a child in school or, for that matter, to anyone who has been a ch

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问题     Good teachers matter. This may seem obvious to anyone who has a child in school or, for that matter, to anyone who has been a child in school. For a long time, though, researchers couldn’t actually prove that teaching talent was important. But new research finally shows that teacher quality is a close cousin to student achievement: A great teacher can cram one-and-a-half grades’ worth of learning into a single year, while laggards are lucky to accomplish half that much.
    Yet, while we know now that better teachers are critical, flaws in the way that administrators select and retain them mean that schools don’t always hire the best.
    Failing to recognize the qualities that make teachers truly effective and to construct incentives to attract and retain more of these top performers has serious consequences. Higher salaries draw more weak as well as strong applicants into teaching — applicants the current hiring system can’t adequately screen. Unless administrators have incentives to hire the best teachers available, it’s pointless to give them a larger group to choose from. Study after study has shown that teachers with master’s degrees are no better than those without. Job experience does matter, but only for the first few years, according to research by Hoover Institution’s Eric A. Hanushek. A teacher with 15 years of experience is no more effective, on average, than a teacher with five years of experience, but which one do you think is paid more?
    This toxic combination of rigid pay and steep rewards for seniority causes average quality to decline rather than increase as teacher groups get older. Top performers often leave the field early for industries that reward their excellence. Mediocre teachers, on the other hand, are soon overcompensated by seniority pay. And because they are paid more than their skills command elsewhere, these less-capable pedagogues settle in to provide many years-of ineffectual instruction.
    So how can we separate the wheat from the chaff in the teaching profession? To make American schools competitive, we must rethink seniority pay, the value of master’s degrees, and the notion that a teacher can teach everything equally well — especially math and science — without appropriate preparation in the subject.
    Our current education system is unlikely to accomplish this dramatic rethinking. Imagine, for a moment, that American cars had been free in recent decades, while Toyotas and Hondas sold at full price. We’d probably be driving Falcons and Corvairs today. Free public education suffers from a lack of competition in just this way. So while industries from aerospace to drugs have transformed themselves in order to compete, public schooling has stagnated.
    School choice could spark the kind of reformation this industry needs by motivating administrators to hire the best and adopt new strategies to keep top teachers in the classroom. The lesson that good teachers matter should be taught, not as a theory, but as a practice.
By citing the example of the automobile industry, the author intends to argue that

选项 A、Japan’s auto industry is exceeding America’s auto industry.
B、the public schooling has stagnated because of competition.
C、the current American education system is better than the Japanese one.
D、competition must be introduced into the public education system.

答案D

解析 事实细节题。文章所举的汽车行业的例子是在倒数第二段。作者在讲完汽车的例子之后,做了总结:免费的公共教育就是缺乏这种竞争机制。可见,举例的目的就是为了指出这个问题。因此,本题答案为[D]。[A]属于对字面意思的肤浅理解,不符合上下文语义。[B]与原文意思相反,教育行业是因为缺乏竞争而停滞不前的,并不是由竞争导致的。[C]更属于无中生有,原文并没有比较日本和美国的教育。
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