Education policy

教育政策

Class struggle

阶级的挣扎

NEWARK

 纽瓦克市（美国新泽西州港市）

Cory Booker helped turn round Newark’s schools. Taking credit for that in the Democratic primary is tricky

科里·布克帮助纽瓦克的学校扭亏为盈。在民主党初选中取得这样的成绩并不容易

On september 24th 2010 “The Oprah Winfrey Show” hosted the unlikely trio of Cory Booker, who was then the Democratic mayor of Newark, Chris Christie, who was then the Republican governor of New Jersey, and a skittish-looking Mark Zuckerberg. They were there to announce a $100m donation from the Facebook founder to help Newark’s beleaguered schools. Mr Booker promised it would be a “bold new paradigm for educational excellence in the country”, and helped raise another $100m in matching donations.

2010年9月24日，《奥普拉·温弗瑞秀》(The Oprah Winfrey Show)主持了一场出人意料的三人秀:时任纽瓦克市长的民主党人科里·布克(Cory Booker)，时任新泽西州州长的共和党人克里斯·克里斯蒂(Chris Christie)，以及外表轻浮（个人不明白外国人对扎克伯格的看法，用这个词实在不知道选哪个中文意思，如果说他年起，那就应该是看起来略显轻浮吧）的马克·扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)。他们在那里宣布Facebook创始人捐赠1亿美元帮助纽瓦克的贫困学校。布克承诺，这将是“美国教育卓越的一个大胆的新范例”，并帮助筹集了另外1亿美元匹配捐款。

词汇

Trio/  三重唱；三件一套；三个一组

Skittish/轻佻的，善变的；不安的，易受惊的；难驾驭的

Beleaguered/围困的；包围的

Paradigm/  范例；词形变化表

Now that Mr Booker is a New Jersey senator running for president in a crowded Democratic primary, he seldom brings up the Zuckerberg donation. That is not because the schools have failed to improve. They have done so significantly, though not to the degree envisioned by Mr Booker, who exclaimed that “you could flip a whole city!” Instead, it is because the ingredients of Newark’s education turnaround—the closing of bad schools, renegotiating teacher contracts to include merit pay, and expanding high-performing charter networks—are anathema to the Democratic primary voting base.

现在布克先生是新泽西州的参议员，在竞争激烈的民主党初选中竞选总统，他很少提起扎克伯格的捐款。这并不是因为学校没有改善。他们取得了如此显著的成就，尽管没有达到布克所预想的程度。相反，这是因为纽瓦克教育改革的组成部分——关闭质量差的学校，重新谈判教师合同以包括绩效工资，以及扩大高效的特许经营网络——这是民主党初选选民的诅咒。（结合全文 chart-宪章；执照；特许状；应该可以理解为一种私立学院，民办学校）

词汇

Envision/想象；预想

Ingredients/材料；佐料

Merit/优点，价值；功绩；功过

Anathema/诅咒；革出教门；被诅咒者；令人厌恶的人

Outside Newark, the public perception of the school reforms remains widely negative. Much of that is due to Dale Russakoff, a journalist, who wrote an influential and stinging portrayal of the efforts in her book, “The Prize”. Cami Anderson, the hard-charging superintendent appointed to oversee the plan, was widely criticised, and then resigned after Mr Booker decamped from Newark to Washington in 2013. Ras Baraka, a former high-school principal who is the current mayor, won election after making the contest a referendum over Ms Anderson’s popularity.

在纽瓦克以外，公众对学校改革的看法仍然普遍持负面态度。这在很大程度上要归功于记者戴尔•鲁萨科夫(Dale Russakoff)，她在自己的《获奖》(the Prize)一书中对这些努力进行了颇具影响力且尖锐的描述。被任命监督该计划的严厉主管卡米•安德森(Cami Anderson)受到广泛批评，在布克2013年从纽瓦克搬到华盛顿后辞职。前高中校长、现任市长拉斯•巴拉卡(Ras Baraka)在就安德森的人气举行全民公投后赢得了选举。

词汇

Stinging/激烈的；刺人的；

Portrayal/  描绘；画像，肖像

Superintendent/监督人；负责人；主管；指挥者

Referendum/公民投票权；外交官请示书

A review of the recent evidence suggests this pessimism is misplaced. For district schools, the high-school graduation rate has climbed to 76%, up from 61% in 2011. A study done by researchers at Harvard found an initial drop-off in test scores, and then, after the reforms set in, a big improvement in English tests, though not in maths. Two-thirds of the growth was attributable to changes in the composition of schools—the closing down of a third of the city’s public schools and expansion of high-performing charters. Today, 31% of black pupils attend schools that exceed the state average, compared with 10% in 2011. All this, even though Newark remains profoundly poor. Nearly 40% of the children live with families making less than the federal poverty line (currently $21,300 for a family of three). The vast majority, 79%, of schoolchildren are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches.

对近期证据的回顾表明，这种悲观看法是错误的。在地区学校，高中毕业率从2011年的61%上升到76%。哈佛大学的研究人员进行的一项研究发现，学生的考试成绩一开始出现下降，但改革开始后，学生的英语考试成绩有了很大提高，尽管数学成绩没有提高。三分之二的增长归因于学校组成的变化——关闭了该市三分之一的公立学校，并扩大了表现优异的特许学校。如今，31%的黑人学生就读的学校超过了该州的平均水平，而2011年这一比例为10%。所有这些，尽管纽瓦克仍然极度贫困。近40%的儿童生活在收入低于联邦贫困线的家庭(目前一个三口之家的收入为21,300美元)。绝大多数(79%)的学生穷到有资格享受免费或减价的学校午餐。

词汇

Misplaced/不合时宜的；不适宜的

Federal/联邦制的

If Mr Booker believes deeply in anything, it is school choice. In 1998, when he was still a little-known city councillor, he founded Excellent Education for Everyone, which advocates charter schools and voucher programmes. He sat on the board of Alliance for School Choice, a national organisation, alongside Betsy DeVos, who would become education secretary under President Donald Trump.

如果布克先生坚信什么，那就是学校的选择。1998年，当他还是名不见经传的市议员时，他创立了“人人享有卓越教育”(Excellent Education for Everyone)，倡导特许学校和代金券（政府补助消费者抵用券）计划。他和贝琪•德沃斯(Betsy DeVos)一起，是全国组织“择校联盟”(Alliance for School Choice)的董事会成员。德沃斯将成为唐纳德•特朗普(Donald Trump)总统任内的教育部长。

词汇

Councilor/议员；顾问

Voucher/收据；证人

 

School choice has always scrambled the usual left-right divide in American politics. Mr Booker’s belief in it differs strongly from Ms DeVos’s and as a senator he voted against her confirmation. Whereas those on the right see parental choice as a good in itself—and as a way to expand religious education—progressives favour charter schools as a path to opportunity for poor black and Hispanic children whom urban school systems have failed for decades. “What do middle-class people do? They don’t wait for the district to fix itself. If [school choice] is good enough for middleclass people, then poor people should be able to as well,” says Shavar Jeffries, a civilrights lawyer who runs Democrats for Education Reform, a pro-charter group.

择校一直扰乱着美国政治中常见的左右分化。布克先生对此的信念与德沃斯女士截然不同，作为参议员，他曾投票反对她的任命。而那些右翼人士则认为父母的选择本身是一件好事——同时也是扩大宗教教育的一种方式——进步人士则倾向于特许学校，认为这是一条为贫困的黑人和西班牙裔儿童提供机会的道路，这些儿童的城市教育体系已经失败了几十年。“中产阶级做什么?”他们不会等着这个地区自我修复。如果(学校选择)对中产阶级足够好，那么穷人也应该有能力，”支持特许经营的民主教育改革组织(Democrats for Education Reform)的民权律师沙瓦尔•杰弗里斯(Shavar Jeffries)这样说道。

词汇

Civilrights/民事权利

Ms Anderson, the former superintendent, who now runs a school-discipline initiative, feels vindicated. “The results speak for themselves,” she says. “The fact that the establishment has been quiet is because it’s working.” The rhetoric from Mr Baraka, the mayor who pushed her out, has changed from outright hostility to comfortable neutrality. Ms Anderson describes an ingrained culture of cronyism before she arrived: requests to hire as a teacher the girlfriend of someone politically connected, even though she could not write a cover letter; or not to sack another grandee’s nephew for punching someone in a school cafeteria. Ms Anderson fired most of the district’s principals, whom she found unsatisfactory, and hired her own handpicked ones.

安德森女士，这位前校长，现在掌握着校园纪律管辖权，觉得自己是对的。“结果不言自明，”她说。“这所学校之所以保持沉默，是因为学校还在正常工作。把她赶出去的市长巴拉卡先生的言辞已经从完全的敌意转变为温和的中立。安德森描述了她上任前根深蒂固的任人唯亲文化:要求聘用一位有政治背景的人做老师，即使她不会写求职信;或者，不要因为另一个大人物的侄子在学校食堂打人而解雇他。安德森女士解雇了该地区的大部分校长，她发现这些校长并不令人满意，于是自己亲自挑选了一些校长。

词汇

Superintendent/监督人；负责人；主管；指挥者

Vindicate/ 维护；证明…无辜；证明…正确

Rhetoric/修辞，修辞学；华丽的词藻

Ingrained/根深蒂固的；彻头彻尾的；生染的

Cronyism/任人唯亲；任用亲信

Disruption was also especially threatening because the school district was one of the largest employers in the city. The budget was nearly $1bn a year—meaning that even the impressive-seeming $200m donation, which was spent over five years, represented only a 4% annual increase in funding. Some of the jobs supported by the big budget seemed superfluous. In her book Ms Russakoff describes a Gogol-like setting in which the clerks had clerks. More than half of the district’s funding—a notpaltry $20,000 per pupil—was gobbled up in central-bureaucracy costs before it reached classrooms.

外界的扰乱尤其具有威胁，因为学区是该市最大的雇主（捞钱地？）之一。预算为每年近10亿美元，这意味着即使是5年多的2亿美元的惊人捐款，也只代表了每年4%的资金增长。大预算支持的一些工作似乎是多余的。在她的书中，Russakoff女士描述了一个类似gogols的场景（Gogol/果戈里，果戈理所创作的文学作品，大都是围绕着故事而展开的，但是他故事的编排与发展却是荒诞不经的。在这种荒诞不经的故事中，作者安排一些荒诞不经的结局与过程，在这祥不可思议的故事情节中，去感受作者的对俄国社会与俄国专制制度的残酷性。果戈理往往是在人民的社会生活中找寻主人公，他们大都是俄国制度下的小官僚，然后，对这个小官僚进行夸张的人生塑造，从而达到作者讽刺俄国社会制度与社会现实的作用），在这个场景中，职员有职员。该地区超过一半的资金——每个学生不少于2万美元——在到达教室之前就被中央政府的官僚成本吞噬了。

词汇

superfluous/多余的；不必要的；奢侈的

clerk/办事员；文书

paltry/不足取的；无价值的；

It’s up to you, Newark

由你决定，纽瓦克

A third of pupils in Newark now attend charter schools. According to an assessment done by credo, a research outfit at Stanford University, in 2015 Newark’s charters were the second highest-performing in the country. They delivered gains in maths and reading almost equivalent to a full additional year of instruction, the researchers estimated. The latest state assessments for reading and maths for pupils in the third to eighth grades (roughly between the ages of 8 and 14) still show stark differences—60% of pupils in Newark’s charter schools were proficient in English, compared with just 35% in the traditional public schools. For maths, the numbers were 48% compared with 26%. In both cases, the charters beat the state average—a remarkable achievement given the impoverishment of Newark and the high quality of the state’s other schools.

纽瓦克市三分之一的学生现在就读于特许学校。斯坦福大学研究机构credo的一项评估显示，2015年纽瓦克的特许学校排名第二。研究人员估计，他们在数学和阅读方面取得的进步几乎相当于整整一年的额外教学。最新的针对三年级到八年级学生(大约在8岁到14岁之间)的阅读和数学的州评估仍然显示出明显的差异——纽瓦克特许学校60%的学生精通英语，而传统公立学校只有35%。在数学方面，这个数字是48%，而在数学方面是26%。在这两种情况下，特许学校都超过了该州的平均水平——考虑到纽瓦克的贫困和该州其他学校的高质量，这是一个了不起的成就。

 

As a result, demand for charters from parents is high. Before a common enrolment system was in place, the waiting list for kipp schools, a high-performing charter network, had 10,000 children on it, says Ryan Hill, the co-founder. One of the topranked high schools in the state of New Jersey is North Star Academy Charter, which is 98% non-white and 85% poor. Its most recent valedictorian is heading to Princeton.

因此，家长对教学质量的需求很高。联合创始人瑞安•希尔(Ryan Hill)表示，在实行共同招生制度之前，kipp学校(一个表现优异的特许经营网络)的等候名单上有1万名学生。新泽西州排名最靠前的高中之一是北极星学院特许学校(North Star Academy Charter)，其中98%是非白人，85%是穷人。最近一次致告别辞的学生代表将前往普林斯顿大学。

词汇

Charters/宪章，合同（这里应该可以引申为教学质量，一种入学前就已有的一种教学质量保证）

Valedictorian/（毕业典礼上）致告别辞的最优秀毕业生

Not all charters are so good. On average, their outcomes are similar to those of traditional public schools. They do better in cities, and worse elsewhere. The problem is that teachers’ unions are at their strongest in precisely the places where charters are best, making the politics of school reform treacherous for Democrats. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator also running for the Democratic nomination, favoured school choice before she was a public figure, on similar progressiveminded grounds (she worried that the zero-sum race to buy property near good schools was endangering middle-class finances). But she opposed a referendum to increase the number of charters in Boston, despite the fact that these are the highestperforming in the country.

并不是所有的合约都这么好。平均而言，他们的成绩与传统公立学校相似。他们在城市做得更好，在其他地方做得更差。问题在于教师工会在特许经营最好的地方最强大，这使得学校改革的政治对民主党人来说是危险的。同样竞选民主党提名的马萨诸塞州参议员伊丽莎白•沃伦(Elizabeth Warren)在成为公众人物之前就倾向于选择学校，理由与她类似(她担心在好学校附近买房的零和竞争危及中产阶级的财务状况)。但她反对在波士顿举行公投，增加特许经营的数量，尽管这些特许经营（的学校）是全国表现最好的。

词汇

Treacherous/奸诈的，叛逆的，背叛的；危险的；不牢靠的

Mr Booker is trying to navigate these treacherous waters. His proposed education manifesto for 2020 is to increase funding for educating special-needs children and to pay teachers more. These proposals are fine. Yet Mr Booker is the only candidate with a serious educational achievement under his belt—and the essential ingredients of that turnaround are not what he is promising now. His campaign replies that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for education reform.

布克先生正试图驾驭这片危险的水域。他提出的2020年教育宣言是增加对特殊需要儿童的教育资金，并增加教师的工资。这些提议很好。然而，布克先生是唯一一位在教育方面取得重大成就的候选人，而这一转变的关键因素并不是他现在所承诺的。他的竞选团队回应说，教育改革没有一刀切的解决方案。

词汇

Treacherous/奸诈的，叛逆的，背叛的；危险的；不牢靠的

Manifesto/宣言；声明；告示

Ingredient/材料；佐料

one-size-fits-all/一刀切；一体适用；万全之策

Mr Booker is already taking flak for his record in Newark. “Cory Booker Hates Public Schools” blusters a headline from Jacobin, a widely read democratic-socialist magazine. He has some defenders too, though. “It is a shame to deride the good work that was done in Newark as a defect of his candidacy or his worldview,” says Derrell Bradford, a long-time advocate of education reform who worked with Mr Booker early in his career. “Newark now is better than when I took my job in 2002. If you’re a poor kid, a black kid, your opportunity to succeed is much higher than before. Is it what it should be, or ought to be? Still no— but there’s been tremendous progress.”

布克先生已经因为他在纽瓦克的记录而受到抨击。“科里·布克痛恨公立学校”，这是一本广泛阅读的民主社会主义杂志《雅各宾》的“气势汹汹的”标题。不过，他也有一些捍卫者。长期倡导教育改革的德雷尔•布拉德福德(Derrell Bradford)表示:“嘲笑纽瓦克的良好表现是一种耻辱，因为这是他竞选资格或世界观的缺陷。”“纽瓦克现在比我2002年上任时好多了。如果你是一个贫穷的孩子，一个黑人孩子，你成功的机会比以前高得多。它（教育政策）应该是什么，或者应该是什么?仍然没有——但是已经有了巨大的进步。”

词汇

Blusters/咆哮，气势汹汹地说（但效果不大）