问答题

Once upon a time, American students tested better than any other students in the world. Now, ranked against European schoolchildren, America does about as well as Lithuania, behind at least 10 other nations. (46)The relative decline of American edu- cation at the elementary- and high-school levels has long been a national embarrass- ment as well as a threat to the nation’s future.
For much of this time--roughly the last half century-professional educators believed that if they could only find the right method of instruction, all would be well. (47)However, nothing seemed to achieve significant or lasting improvements, yet in recent years researchers have discovered something that may seem obvious, but for many reasons was overlooked or denied. What really makes a difference, what matters more than the class size or the textbook, the teaching method or the technology, or even the curriculum, is the quality of the teacher. Much of the ability to teach is innate--an ability to inspire young minds as well as control unruly classrooms that some people instinctively possess. (48)Teaching can be taught, to some degree, but not the way many gradu- ate schools of education do it, with a lot of flat or marginally relevant theorizing and teaching methods. In any case the research shows that within about five years, you can generally tell who is a good teacher and who is not.
(49)It is also true and unfortunate that often the weakest teachers are assigned to teach the neediest students, poor minority kids in inner-city schools: for these children, teachers can be make or break. "The research shows that kids who have two, three, four strong teachers in a row will eventually excel, no matter what their back- ground, while kids who have even two weak teachers in a row will never recover," says Kati Haycock of the Education Trust and coauthor of the 2006 study "Teaching Inequality: How Poor and Minority Students Are Shortchanged on Teacher Quality."
(50)Nothing, then, is more important than hiring good teachers and firing bad ones, but here is the rub: al- though many teachers are caring and selfless, teaching in public schools has not always attracted the best and the brightest. There once was a time when teaching (along with nursing) was one of the few jobs not denied to women and minorities. But with social progress, many talented women and minorities chose other and more highly compensated fields. One recent review showed that most schoolteachers are recruited from the bottom third of college-bound high-school students.

The relative decline of American edu- cation at the elementary- and high-school levels has long been a national embarrass- ment as well as a threat to the nation’s future.

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