【文章內(nèi)容簡介】 ther they were assigned to Mrs. Smith or Mr. Brown.Yet, while we know now that better teachers are critical, flaws in the way that administrators select and retain them mean that schools don39。t always hire the best.Many ingredients for good teaching are difficult to ascertain in advance—charisma and diligence e to mind—but research shows a teacher39。s own ability on standardized tests reliably predicts good performance in the classroom. You would think, then, that topscoring teachers would be swimming in job offers, right? Not so, says Vanderbilt University professor Dale Ballou. Highscoring teaching applicants do not fare better than others in the job market, he writes. Indeed, remarkably they do somewhat worse.Even more surprising, given the national shortage of highly skilled math and science teachers, school administrators are more keen to hire education majors than applicants who have math or science degrees. No one knows for sure why those who hire teachers routinely overlook top talent. Perhaps they wrongly think that the qualifications they shun make little difference for students. Also, administrators are probably naturally drawn to teachers who remind them of themselves.But failing to recognize the qualities that make teachers truly effective (and to construct incentives to attract and retain more of these top performers) has serious consequences. For example, because schools don39。t always hire the best applicants, acrosstheboard salary increases cannot improve teacher quality much, and may even worsen it. That39。s because higher salaries draw more weak as well as strong applicants into teaching—applicants the current hiring system can39。t adequately screen. Unless administrators have incentives to hire the best teachers available, it39。s pointless to give them a larger group to choose from.If public school hiring processes are bad, their pensation policies are worse. Most districts pay solely based on years of experience and the presence of a master39。s degree, a formula that makes the Federal General Schedule—which governs pay for . bureaucrats—look flexible. Study after study has shown that teachers with master39。s degrees are no better than those without. Job experience does matter, but only for the first few years, according to research by Hoover Institution39。s Eric A. Hanushek. A teacher with 15 years of experience is no more effective, on average, than a teacher with five years of experience, but which one do you think is paid more?This toxic bination of rigid pay and steep rewards for seniority causes average quality to decline rather than increase as teacher groups get older. Top performers often leave the field early for industries that reward their excellence. Mediocre teachers, on the other hand, are soon overpensated by seniority pay. And because they are paid more than their skills mand elsewhere, these lesscapable pedagogues settle in to provide many years of ineffectual :/So how can we separate the wheat from the chaff in the teaching profession? To make American schools petitive, we must rethink seniority pay, the value of master39。s degrees, and the notion that a teacher can teach everything equally well—especially math and science—without appropriate preparation in the subject.://Our current education system is unlikely to acplish this dramatic rethinking. Imagine, for a moment, that American cars had been free in recent decades, while Toyotas and Hondas sold at full price. We39。d probably be driving Falcons and Corvairs today. Free public education suffers from a lack of petition in just this way. So while industries from aerospace to drugs have transformed themselves in order to pete, public schooling has stagnated.School choice could spark the kind of reformation this industry needs by motivating administrators to hire the best and adopt new strategies to keep top teachers in the classroom. The lesson that good teachers matter should be taught, not as a theory, but as a practice.6.The beginning sentence Good teachers matter. can mainly be explained as which of the following?(A) Good teachers help students establish confidence.(B) Good teachers determine the personality of students.(C) Good teachers promote student achievement.(D) Good teachers treat students as their own children.7.According to the author, seniority pay favors ________.(A) good teachers39。 with master39。s degrees(B) young and effective teachers(C) experienced and effective teachers(D) mediocre teachers of average quality:8.The expression separate the wheat from the chaff in the teaching profession is closest in meaning to ________.(A) distinguish better teachers from less capable ones(B) differentiate young teachers from old ones(C) tell the essential qualities of good teaching(D) reevaluate the role of senior teachers9.When the author uses the automobile industry as an example, she argues that ________.(A) Japan39。s auto industry is exceeding America39。s auto industry(B) the public schooling has stagnated because of petition(C) the current American education system is better than the Japanese one(D) petition must be introduced into the public education system10.Which of the following CANNOT be concluded from the passage?(A) Most average teachers want to leave school because of high pressure.(B) Excellent teachers often leave schools for better jobs.(C) The average quality of the teachers in America is declining.(D) Teachers39。 quality is closely related to a number of factors.Questions 1115The British author Salman Rushdie is selling his personal archive to a wealthy American university. The archive, which includes personal diaries written during the decade that he spent living in hiding from Islamic extremists, is being bought by the Emory University in Atlanta for an undisclosed sum. The move has sparked concern that Britain39。s literary heritage is being lost to foreign buyers. The archive also includ