一本教会你“做对”题的6级阅读书 day7 passage7
Passage 7 Testing the Teachers 129
教师的测试 《经济学人》
It is perhaps the hardest reform of all.
Pension systems or energy shortages can be fixed by cutting entitlements
or spending more. But no amount of money can in itself make a million
qualified teachers materialize in less than a generation.
That is the aim of the "Alliance for Educational Quality"
launched by Felipe Calderón, Mexico's president, this month.
To signal its importance,
he gathered together much of his cabinet for the signing ceremony
on May 15th. The document his pen hovered over was not a new law,
but rather an agreement with Elba Esther Gordillo,
head of the national teachers' union.
Ms Gordillo is a powerful political figure in Mexico.
Her critics contend that she is more of a politician than an educator,
[01:03]and say that her union has long been an obstacle to improving education.
[01:09]But Mr Calderón is by nature a pragmatic dealmaker,
[01:15]and ignoring the union would only have led to a hopeless stalemate.
[01:21] The need for good teachers is glaring.
[01:25]Mexico was placed dead last among members of the Organization
[01:30]for Economic Co-operation and Development,
[01:34]a club of mainly developed countries, in reading,
[01:37]science and mathematics in December
[01:41]by the Program for International Student Assessment.
[01:45]Look beyond simple place rankings and the picture gets worse.
[01:51]On the reading part of the test,
[01:53]less than 1% of Mexican 15-year olds scored as "capable of sophisticated,
[02:01]critical thinking" (compared with 22% in South Korea, the top scorer).
[02:08]Over half of Mexican 15-year olds were classed
[02:12]as incapable of doing basic arithmetic on the maths portion of the test.
[02:20]The main problem lies not with salaries for teaching,
[02:24]which are competitive with other jobs in Mexico,
[02:28]but with the quality of teachers.
[02:31]The government has been trying to solve the problem since 1992,
[02:37]when it introduced annual bonuses linked to teachers' participation
[02:42]in training courses and their scores on tests.
[02:47]This system is far from perfect. A study last year by the Rand Corporation,
[02:55]an American think-tank,
[02:57]found that the tests given to teachers
[03:00]required "only low level cognitive responses",
[03:05]while the criteria for evaluation were fuzzy and subject to manipulation.
[03:12]The new agreement between Mr Calderón and Ms Gordillo has two aims.
[03:20]First,
[03:21]there is a promise to improve the fabric of the 27,000 schools-around one
[03:27]in eight-that are in poor repair.
[03:30]Second, it seeks to break the hold of the union over teachers' careers.
[03:37]Under the agreement,
[03:39]teachers would be hired and promoted according to
[03:42]how they fare in a set of tests devised and marked by a new independent body.