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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.
Paragraph 2 is written to show the proposal of the national education standards______.
选项 A、fails to reflect the uniqueness of education field
B、has a weak theoretical grounding
C、is doomed to receive a disagreement
D、discounts the benefit of the internal competition
答案B
解析 本题考查写作目的。第一段介绍了国家课程设置的目的：通过设定高标准提高学生的竞争力。这说明该提议的理论依据为：高标准产生高质量。第二段对此依据进行了讨论：首先，以运动业和制造业中的实例说明该理论具有一定的合理性。倒数第二句用转折连词but引出作者真正要表达的思想：不同于运动业和制造业的是，教育行业并非竞争性领域，所以并非高标准产生高质量。并在末句进一步否定了该理论：在教育领域，不是“外在的高标准会创造卓越品质”而是“追求卓越的竞争产生了高标准”。可见，作者是运用该段内容否定教育标准的理论基础。[B]正确。第二段旨在说明“高标准产生高水平”这一准则不适用于教育领域，而非突出教育领域与众不同的特点。[A]错误。该段只是论述了在教育领域中建立高标准没有理论依据，并没有进一步说明这一提议势必不会被认可。[C]言辞过于激烈。考生误选[D]是因为对该段末句中的external理解错误：external并非将竞争区分为“内部竞争”和“外部竞争”，而是指出教育的“外在标准”和“自身质量”的关系。
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