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  3. How Should Teachers Be Rewarded? We never forget our best teachers-those who inspired us with a deeper understanding or an e

How Should Teachers Be Rewarded? We never forget our best teachers-those who inspired us with a deeper understanding or an e

admin2010-07-24  62
问题                  How Should Teachers Be Rewarded?
    We never forget our best teachers-those who inspired us with a deeper understanding or an enduring passion, the ones we come back to visit years after graduating, the educators who opened doors and altered the course of our lives.
    It would be wonderful if we knew more about such talented teachers and how to multiply their number. How do they come by their craft? What qualities and capacities do they possess? Can these abilities be measured? Can they be taught? Perhaps above all:How should excellent teaching be rewarded so that the best teachers--the most competent, caring and compelling--remain in a profession known for low pay and low status?
    Such questions have become critical to the future of public education in the U.S. Even as politicians push to hold schools and their faculty members responsible as never before for student learning, the nation faces a shortage of teaching talent. About 3.2 million people teach in U.S. public schools, but, according to an estimate made by economist William Hussar at the National Center for Education Statistics, the nation will need to recruit an additional 2.8 million over the next eight years owing to baby-boomer retirement, growing student enrollment and staff turnover (人员调整)--which is especially rapid among new teachers. Finding and keeping high-quality teachers are key to America’s competitiveness as a nation. Recent test results show that U.S. 10th-graders ranked just 17th in science among peers from 30 nations, while in math they placed in the bottom five. Research suggests that a good teacher is the single most important factor in boosting achievement, more important than class size, the dollars spent per student or the quality of textbooks and materials.
    Across the country, hundreds of school districts are experimenting with new ways to attract, reward and keep good teachers. Many of these efforts borrow ideas from business. They include signing bonuses for hard-to-fill jobs like teaching high school chemistry, housing allowances and what might be called combat pay for teachers who commit to working in the most distressed schools. But the idea gaining the most motivation--and controversy--is merit pay, which attempts to measure the quality of teachers’ work and pay teachers accordingly.
    Traditionally, public-school salaries are based on years spent on the job and college credits earned, a system favored by unions because it treats all teachers equally. Of course, everyone knows that not all teachers are equal. Just witness how hard parents try to get their kids into the best classrooms. And yet there is no universally accepted way to measure competence, much less the great charm of a truly brilliant educator. In its absence, policy-makers have focused on that current measure of all things educational: student test scores. In districts across the country, administrators are devising systems that track student scores back to the teachers who taught them in an attempt to assign credit and blame and, in some cases, target help to teachers who need it. Offering bonuses to teachers who raise student achievement, the theory goes, will improve the overall quality of instruction, retain those who get the job done and attract more highly qualified candidates to the profession--all while lifting those all-important test scores.
    Such efforts have been encouraged by the Bush Administration, which in 2006 started a program that awards $99 million a year in grants to districts that link teacher compensation to raising student test scores. Merit pay has also become part of the debate in Congress over how to improve the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act. Last summer, Barack Obama signed merit pay at a meeting of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, so long as the measure of merit is "developed with teachers, not imposed on them and not based on some test score." Hillary Clinton says she does not support merit pay for individual teachers but does advocate performance-based pay on a schoolwide basis.
    It’s hard to argue against the notion of rewarding the best teachers for doing a good job. But merit pay has a long history in the U.S., and new programs to pay teachers according to test scores have already had an opposite effect in Florida and Houston. What holds more promise is broader efforts to transform the profession by combining merit pay with more opportunities for professional training and support, thoughtful assessments of how teachers do their jobs and new career paths for top teachers.
    To the business-minded people who are increasingly running the nation’s schools, there’s an obvious solution to the problems of teacher quality and teacher turnover: offer better pay for better performance. The challenge is deciding who deserves the extra cash. Merit-pay movements in the 1920s, ’50s and ’80s turned to failure just because of that question, as the perception grew that bonuses were awarded to principals’pets. Charges of unfairness, along with unreliable funding and union opposition, sank such experiments.
    But in an era when states are testing all students annually, there’s a new, less subjective window onto how well a teacher does her job. As early as 1982, University of Tennessee statistician Sanders seized on the idea of using student test data to assess teacher performance. Working with elementary-school test results in Tennessee, he devised a way to calculate an individual teacher’s contribution to student progress. Essentially, his method is this: he takes three or more years of student test results, projects a trajectory (轨迹) for each student based on past performance and then looks at whether, at the end of the year, the students in a given teacher’s class tended to stay on course, soar above expectations or fall short. Sanders uses statistical methods to adjust for flaws and gaps in the data. "Under the best circumstances," he claims, "we can reliably identify the top 10% to 30% of teachers."
    Sanders devised his method as a management tool for administrators, not necessarily as a basis for performance pay. But increasingly, that’s what it is used for. Today he heads a group at the North Carolina-based software firm SAS, which performs value-added analysis for North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and districts in about 15 other states. Most use it to measure schoolwide performance, but some are beginning to use value-added calculations to determine bonuses for individual teachers.
Student test scores have become the key measure of teachers’performance due to ______.
选项 A、the lack of well-accepted standards
B、the absence of federal funding
C、strong theoretical support
D、past successful experience
答案A
解析 In its absence指的是缺少第4句提到的universally accepted way to measure competence．这是学生考试成绩成为衡量教师表现的原因，A的lack与原文absence同义，well-accepted standards与原文universally accepted way同义，故选A。干扰项B的absence直接照抄原文，但federal funding无原文支持，故不选。
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