Passage 7 Testing the Teachers 129
教师的测试 《经济学人》

[00:01]It is perhaps the hardest reform of all.
[00:04]Pension systems or energy shortages can be fixed by cutting entitlements
[00:10]or spending more. But no amount of money can in itself make a million
[00:16]qualified teachers materialize in less than a generation.
[00:21]That is the aim of the "Alliance for Educational Quality"
[00:25]launched by Felipe Calderón, Mexico's president, this month.
[00:31]To signal its importance,
[00:33]he gathered together much of his cabinet for the signing ceremony
[00:37]on May 15th. The document his pen hovered over was not a new law,
[00:44]but rather an agreement with Elba Esther Gordillo,
[00:48]head of the national teachers' union.
[00:52]Ms Gordillo is a powerful political figure in Mexico.
[00:57]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.