Good teachers matter. This may seem obvious to anyone who has a child in school or, for that matter, to anyone who has been a child in school. For a long time, though, researchers couldn’t actually prove that teaching talent was important. But new research finally shows that teacher quality is a close cousin to student achievement. A great teacher can cram one-and-a-half grades’ worth of learning into a single year, while laggards are lucky to accomplish half that much. Parents and kids, it seems, have been right all along to care whether 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 don’t always hire the best.
Many ingredients for good teaching are difficult to ascertain in advance—charisma and diligence come to mind—but research shows a teacher’s own ability on standardized tests reliably predicts good performance in the classroom. You would think, then, that top— scoring teachers would be swimming in job offers, right Not so, says Vanderbilt University professor Dale Ballou. High-scoring 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 don’t always hire the best applicants, across-the-board salary increases cannot improve teacher quality much, and may even worsen it. That’s because higher salaries draw more weak as well as p applicants into teaching-applicants the current hiring system can’t adequately screen. Unless administrators have incentives to hire the best teachers available, it’s pointless to give them a larger group to choose from.
If public school hiring processes are bad, their compensation policies are worse. Most districts pay solely based on years of experience and the presence of a master’s degree, a formula that makes the Federal General Schedule—which governs pay for U. S. bureaucrats—look flexible. Study after study has shown that teachers with master’s degrees are no better than those without. Job experience does matter, but only for the first few years, according to research by Hoover Institution’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 combination 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 overcompensated by seniority pay. And because they are paid more than their skills command elsewhere, these less-capable pedagogues settle in to provide many years of ineffectual instruction.
So how can we separate the wheat from the chaff in the teaching profession To make American schools competitive, we must rethink seniority pay, the value of master’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 accomplish this dramatic rethinking. Imagine, for a moment, that American cars had been free in recent decades, while Toyotas and Hondas sold at full price. We’d probably be driving Falcons and Corvairs today. Free public education suffers from a lack of competition in just this way. So while industries from aerospace to drugs have transformed themselves in order to compete, 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.
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 teachers
这些好玩的小玩意儿提供存放空间。
乌得勒支艺术学院的大学生埃里克设计出一种高科技牛仔裤，在大腿部位装有无线电蓝牙键盘，后兜里放有鼠标，膝盖上装有话筒。有些人或许会觉得这种在大腿上敲键盘的方式有点儿不雅，但它凸显了这种高科技在推动服装技术的发展。还有人利用一种镍钛记忆合金，改变服装面料的质地，使之发光的嵌料可以移动，就像是它们在呼吸，有点儿像珊瑚随潮水移动一样。
卡拉扬被公认是高科技服装的创始人，他两次荣获“年度最佳英国设计师”的美称。伦敦设计博物馆正在举办一场有趣而诱人的杰作。这些作品向人们展示的全是卡拉扬的杰作。这些作品向人们展示了他们15年的设计生涯。其中的一件作品是由水晶和激光制成的服装，可以产生艳丽的光影闪烁的郊果，还有两件带液晶显示屏的衣服，上面显示的是水底世界。卡拉扬认为，将科
牙键盘，后兜里放有鼠标，膝盖上装有话筒的牛子裤。小题2:选出符合原文内容信息的一项是（ ）