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  3. This weekend marks 25 years since the publication of the U. S. Department of Education’s explosive report A Nation at Risk. Its

This weekend marks 25 years since the publication of the U. S. Department of Education’s explosive report A Nation at Risk. Its

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问题     This weekend marks 25 years since the publication of the U. S. Department of Education’s explosive report A Nation at Risk. Its powerful indictment of American education launched the largest education-reform movement in the nation’s history, paving the way for strategies as different as charter schools and the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. But even after a vast political and financial investment spanning two and a half decades, we’ re far from achieving the report’ s ambitious aims.
    We’ve learned a lot about school reform in 25 years, lessons that suggest that it is possible, eventually , to achieve A Nation at Risk’s ambitious aims. We’ve learned that a lot of public schools require incentives to lift their sights for their students. The nation’s long tradition of letting local school boards set standards isn’t going to get us where we need to go educationally. If anything, NCLB’s requirement of statewide standards needs to be taken to its logical conclusion—rigorous national standards. Make them voluntary. Give states and school systems different ways of measuring their progress against the standards by sanctioning a number of different national examination boards. And reward educators for meeting the new standards (NCLB only punishes schools for not meeting state standards, which encourages states to keep standards low because they don’t want a lot of their schools labeled as failures).
    But improvement can’t merely be imposed on schools from the outside. Schools are complex social enterprises; their success depends on thousands of daily personal interactions. They are, in the end, only as good as the people in them and the culture in which those people work. So it’s crucial to get everyone in a school community invested in a school’s mission. Ownership is key. That comes from giving schools autonomy—in staffing, budgeting and instruction. From giving families a chance to choose their public schools. And from school leadership that promotes a strong sense of school identity and clear expectations of success. Reform has to come from the inside-out as well as the outside-in. There’s a human side of school reform that we ignore at our peril.
    But if achieving A Nation at Risk’s vision is becoming increasingly difficult, the alternative is really no alternative. The American economy hasn’t collapsed in the absence of public-school reform because its success is driven mainly by the small segment of the workforce that is highly educated. But the plight of the middle class that the reform reports of the 1980s warned about has worsened as the wage gap between high-school graduates and the college-educated has widened, creating an increasingly two-tiered society—and an ever-greater need to arm every American with the high-quality education that A Nation at Risk envisioned.
NCLB might fail its ambitious goals if______.
选项 A、states were allowed to set standards for their students
B、too strong a case were made for formulating national standards
C、national examination boards were sanctioned to measure school progress
D、the standards set by states were too low to ensure progress
答案D
解析 细节题。第二段最后一句(括号内句子)提到：NCLB规定只惩罚那些达不到各州制定的标准的学校，这存在着一个严重的缺陷，即各州可能把自己的标准制定得比较低，以便使它们的许多学校都能达到这些标准的要求。这样一来，NCLB旨在提高教育质量的改革就会受挫。故D符合题意，为正确选项。
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