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Until recently, the main villains of the piece had seemed to be the teachers’ unions, who have opposed any sort of reform or accountability. Now they face competition from an unexpectedly destructive force: the court. Fifty years ago, it was the judges who forced the schools to desegregate through Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Now the courts have moved from broad principles to micromanagement, telling schools how much money to spend and where - right down to the correct computer or textbook. Twenty four states are currently Stuck in various court cases to do with financing school systems, and another 21 have only recently settled various suits. Most will start again soon. Only five states have avoided litigation entirely. Nothing exemplifies the power of the courts better than an 11-year-old case that is due to be settled (sort of) in New York City, the home of America’s biggest school system with 1. lm students and a budget nearing $13 billion. At the end of this month, three elderly members of the New York bar serving as judicial referees are due to rule in a case brought By the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, a leftish advocacy group, against the state of New York: they will decide how much more must Be spent to provide every New York City pupil with a "sound basic" education. Rare is the politician willing to argue that more money for schools is a bad thing. But are the courts doing any good Two suspicions arise. First, judges are making a lazy assumption that more money means better schools. As the international results show, the link between "inputs" and "outputs" is vague--something well documented by, among others, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. Second, the courts are muddling an already muddled system. Over time, they have generally made it harder to get rid of disruptive pupils and bad teachers. The current case could be even worse. The courts have already said that, in order to determine the necessary spending, they may consider everything from class size to the availability of computers, textbooks and even pencils. This degree of intervention is all the more scandalous because the courts have weirdly decided to ignore another set of "inputs"--the archaic work practices of school teachers and janitors. David Schoenbrod and Ross Sandier of New York Law School reckon the demands of the court will simply undermine reform and transform an expensive failure into a more expensive one. And of course, the litigation never ends. Kentucky, for example, is still in court 16 years after the first decision. A lawsuit first filed against New Jersey for its funding of schools in 1981 was "decided" four years later--but it has returned to the court nine times since, including early this year, with each decision pushing the court deeper into the management of the state’s schools. Bad iudges are even harder to boot out of school than bad pupils. "Inputs" as used in the text refer to all of the following Except ______.
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Stephen M. Saland, chairman of the State Senate Education Committee, is a conservative upstate Republican, and Steven Sanders, chairman of the Assembly Education Committee, is a liberal New York City Democrat. But when it comes to education, they have much in common. Neither is a fan of the federal No Child Left Behind Law and its extensive testing mandates. Both say that standardized tests are too dominant in public schools today.That has at times put the two education chairmen in conflict with the state education commissioner, Richard P. Mills. (46) During his 10 year tenure, Dr. Mills has turned New York into one of the most test-driven public systems in the nation, requiring students to pass five state tests to graduate.(47) For months now, the legislative leaders and the commissioner have been locked in a little-noticed fight over the future of 28 small alternative public high schools, a fight that may well be the final stand for opponents of standardized testing in New York.Senator Saland and Assemblyman Sanders are doing their best to protect these schools in New York City (Urban Academy, Manhattan International), Ithaca (Lehman Alternative) and Rochester (School Without Walls) and help them retain their distinctive educational approach. (48) Instead of the standard survey courses in global studies, American history, biology and chemistry pegged to state tests, these schools favor courses that go into more depth on narrower topics. At Urban Academy, there are courses in Middle East conflicts, world religions, post-Civil War Reconstruction and microbiology.In the mid-1990’s, the former education commissioner, Thomas Sobol, granted these 28 consortium schools (serving 16,000 students, about 1 percent of New York’s high school population) an exemption from most state tests. That permitted a more innovative curriculum, and students were evaluated via a portfolio system that relies on research papers and science projects reviewed by outside experts like David S. Thaler, a Rockefeller University microbiology professor, and Eric Foner, a Columbia history professor.The Gates Foundation, which has given hundreds of millions of dollars to start small high schools nationwide, is so impressed with these schools, and it regularly sends educators to New York to see how they’re run.But the testing exemption for these schools is about to expire, and Commissioner Mills does not want it renewed. He believes that all students, without exception, should take every test.Recently, Senator Saland defied the commissioner. He shepherded a bill through the Republican controlled Senate that passed 50 to 10 and would continue these schools’ waivers for four years. (49) Senator Saland’s bill does require that students pass the state English and math tests to graduate, letting the state gauge the alternative schools’ performance versus mainstream schools.On the Senate floor, Senator Sa[and noted that while 61 percent of consortium students qualified for free lunches and three quarters were black or Hispanic, 88 percent went on to college, compared with 70 percent at mainstream schools that give state tests. (50) He said that the dropout rate was half the rate at mainstream schools and that on the one statewide test these students took regularly, English, they scored an average of 77, outdoing mainstream students by 5 points. 49
Directions:A. Title: "More haste, less speed" (欲速则不达)B. Word limit: about 160～200 words.C. Your essay must be written neatly on Answer Sheet 2.D. Your essay must be based on the following situation:People generally agree with the saying, yet not everyone observes if in his practice. Make a brief description of people’s practice and state your views with regard to the sayin
Until recently, the common factor in all the science used to figure out if a piece of art was forged was that it was concerned with the medium of the artwork, rather than the art itself. Matters of style and form were left to art historians, who could make erudite,, but qualitative, judgments about whether a painting was really good enough to be, say, a Leonardo. But this is changing. A paper in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Hany Farid and his colleagues at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire uses statistical techniques to examine art itself--the message, not the medium. Dr. Farid employed a technique called wavelet analysis to examine 13 drawings that had at one time or another been attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a 16th-century Flemish painter. He also looked at Perugino’s "Madonna with Child", a 15th-century Italian - masterpiece lodged in the college’s Hood Museum of Art. He concluded, in agreement with art historians, that eight of the putative Bruegels are authentic, while the other five are imitations. In the case of "Madonna with Child", he analysed the six faces in the painting (Mary, the infant Jesus and several saints) and found that three of them were probably done by the same painter, while the other three were each done by a different hand. The view that four different painters worked on the canvas is, he says, consistent with the view of some art historians that Perugino’s apprentices did much of the work, although there is no clear consensus among art historians. As sceptics will doubtless point out, this is a small number of images. Furthermore, Dr. Farid knew before performing the analysis what results he expected. But he is the first to acknowledge that it is early days for his methodology. He hopes to study many more paintings. By looking at large numbers of paintings that are universally believed to be authentic, Dr. Farid hopes to be able to examine doubtful cases with confidence in the future. Even with the Bruegels--real and imitation--though, Dr. Farid’s results are persuasive. It is tricky to describe exactly what it is that distinguishes the real ones from the imitations, but Dr. Farid says that it can be thought of as the nature of the artist’s brushstroke. Unlike some analyses of Jackson Pollock’s work that have been done over the past few years by Richard Taylor of the University of Oregon, Dr. Farid says his technique could, in principle, be used for any artist. What Dr. Farid did was to convert each work of art into a set of mathematical functions. These so-called wavelets describe particular parts of the image as a series of peaks and troughs of variable height and wavelength. By expressing an image this way, it is possible to compress that image while losing very little information. The sums of the wavelets from different images can then be compared. Once he did this, Dr. Farid found that the types of wavelets used to express authentic Bruegels were noticeably different from those used to express the imitations. (The Perugino was analysed by treating the six faces as distinct paintings.) It seems that curators may s6on be able to add another weapon to their anti-forgery arsenal. Farid’s reaction to the sceptics’ accusations is ______.
Stephen M. Saland, chairman of the State Senate Education Committee, is a conservative upstate Republican, and Steven Sanders, chairman of the Assembly Education Committee, is a liberal New York City Democrat. But when it comes to education, they have much in common. Neither is a fan of the federal No Child Left Behind Law and its extensive testing mandates. Both say that standardized tests are too dominant in public schools today.That has at times put the two education chairmen in conflict with the state education commissioner, Richard P. Mills. (46) During his 10 year tenure, Dr. Mills has turned New York into one of the most test-driven public systems in the nation, requiring students to pass five state tests to graduate.(47) For months now, the legislative leaders and the commissioner have been locked in a little-noticed fight over the future of 28 small alternative public high schools, a fight that may well be the final stand for opponents of standardized testing in New York.Senator Saland and Assemblyman Sanders are doing their best to protect these schools in New York City (Urban Academy, Manhattan International), Ithaca (Lehman Alternative) and Rochester (School Without Walls) and help them retain their distinctive educational approach. (48) Instead of the standard survey courses in global studies, American history, biology and chemistry pegged to state tests, these schools favor courses that go into more depth on narrower topics. At Urban Academy, there are courses in Middle East conflicts, world religions, post-Civil War Reconstruction and microbiology.In the mid-1990’s, the former education commissioner, Thomas Sobol, granted these 28 consortium schools (serving 16,000 students, about 1 percent of New York’s high school population) an exemption from most state tests. That permitted a more innovative curriculum, and students were evaluated via a portfolio system that relies on research papers and science projects reviewed by outside experts like David S. Thaler, a Rockefeller University microbiology professor, and Eric Foner, a Columbia history professor.The Gates Foundation, which has given hundreds of millions of dollars to start small high schools nationwide, is so impressed with these schools, and it regularly sends educators to New York to see how they’re run.But the testing exemption for these schools is about to expire, and Commissioner Mills does not want it renewed. He believes that all students, without exception, should take every test.Recently, Senator Saland defied the commissioner. He shepherded a bill through the Republican controlled Senate that passed 50 to 10 and would continue these schools’ waivers for four years. (49) Senator Saland’s bill does require that students pass the state English and math tests to graduate, letting the state gauge the alternative schools’ performance versus mainstream schools.On the Senate floor, Senator Sa[and noted that while 61 percent of consortium students qualified for free lunches and three quarters were black or Hispanic, 88 percent went on to college, compared with 70 percent at mainstream schools that give state tests. (50) He said that the dropout rate was half the rate at mainstream schools and that on the one statewide test these students took regularly, English, they scored an average of 77, outdoing mainstream students by 5 points. 47
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