中英文阅读短文
生的表现就不应为恐慌承担全部责任。尽管美国有竞争本能，但也没有理由仅因为我们在全球优势顺序中的排名就猛烈抨击自己。只要美国的孩子们在绝对意义上没有倒退，美国在全球测试中的相对位置就没有那么重要，更重要的事情取决于这个国家是否改进教学技术以培养它所需要的人力资源。
And by this measure, the U.S. education system, while certainly in need of significant progress, doesn't look to be failing so spectacularly. The performance of American students in science and math has actually improved modestly since the last round of this international test in 2006, rising to the developed-country average in science while remaining only slightly below average in math. U.S. reading scores, in the middle of the pack for developed countries, are more or less unchanged since the most recent comparable tests in 2003. It would probably be unrealistic to expect much speedier progress. As Stuart Kerachsky, deputy commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, put it, "The needle doesn't move very far very fast in education."
美国的教育系统亟待发展，但是依据上述标准，我们的教育体系并未一败涂地。2006年上一轮测试结束之后，美国学生在科学和数学方面的表现是有所提高的，其中科学一项上升到发达国家的平均水平，只在数学方面略低于平均水平。美国学生的阅读水平处在发达国家的中间位置，这与2003年最近一次的测试结果相近。期望更加迅速的进步可能不切实际。正如全国教育统计中心副主任Stuart Kerachsky所说，“在教育领域，针不会走得太快太远。
"The United States Used to Have the World's Smartest Schoolchildren."
“美国曾经拥有世界上最聪明的孩子”
No, it didn't. Even at the height of U.S. geopolitical dominance and economic strength, American students were never anywhere near the head of the class. In 1958, Congress responded to the Sputnik launch by passing the National Defense Education Act, which provided financial support for college students to study math, science, and foreign languages, and was accompanied by intense attention to raising standards in those subjects in American schools. But when the results from the first major international math test came out in 1967, the effort did not seem to have made much of a difference. Japan to
ok first place out of 12 countries, while the United States finished near the bottom.
不，美国没有。即使在美国地缘政治优势和经济实力处于最高点的时候，美国学生也从未在任何地方当过“班长”。1958年，国会为应对苏联人造地球卫星的发射通过了国防教育法，其中规定国家对大学生进行资助，用以学习数学，科学和外语，在此期间，提高学校的学科水平也受到了强烈关注。然而1967年，当第一次大型国
际数学测试的结果出来的时候，这种努力似乎并有太大成效。12国竞赛，日本第一，美国垫底。
By the early 1970s, American students were ranking last among industrialized countries in seven of 19 tests of academic achievement and never made it to first or even second place in any of them. A decade later, "A Nation at Risk," the landmark 1983 report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, cited these and other academic failings to buttress its stark claim that "if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."
截止到70年代初，美国学生在19次学术能力测试中，7次在工业化国家中垫底，并且从未取得过第一甚至第二名。十年后，国家优质教育委员会发表了具有里程碑意义的1983年报告“国家处在危险之中”，其中列举上述及其他学术失误以支持其鲜明的观点，即“如果敌对势力试图把目前存在的平庸的教育水平强加于美国，我们很可能已视其为战争行为。“
Each new cycle of panic and self-flagellation has brought with it a fresh crop of reformers touting a new solution to U.S. scholastic woes. A 1961 book by Arthur S. Trace Jr. called What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn't, for instance, suggested that American students were falling behind their Soviet peers because they weren't learning enough phonics and vocabulary. Today's anxieties are no different, with education wonks from across the policy spectrum enlisting the U.S. education system's sorry global ranking to make the case for their pet ideas. J. Michael Shaughnessy, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, argues that the latest PISA test "underscores the need for integrating reasoning and sense making in our teaching of mathematics." Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, claims that the same results "tell us … that if you don't make smart investments in teachers, respect them, or involve them in decision-makin
g, as the top-performing countries do, students pay a price."
每一轮恐慌和自虐都为我们带来新一批的改革者，他们为美国的学术困境兜售新的解决之道。例如，1961年Arthur S. Trace Jr. 在他的书“伊万知道强尼不知道”中写道，美国学生之所以落后于苏联是因为他们没有学习足够的语音和词汇。今天的焦虑如出一辙，教育白痴们利用美国教育体制的糟糕排名为他们的想法寻有力证据。全国数学教师委员会主席J. Michael Shaughnessy认为，最新的PISA的测试“强调在数学教学中要将推理和意义结合起来。“美国教师联合会负责人Randi Weingarten声称，同样的结果“告诉我们，如果你不像其他国家那样投资教师，尊重教师，让教师参与决策，付出代价的将会学生。
If America
ns' ahistorical sense of their global decline prompts educators to come up with innovative new ideas, that's all to the good. But don't expect any of them to bring the country back to its educational golden age -- there wasn't one.
如果美国人前所未有的衰退感能够激发教育工作者们的创新精神，那再好不过了。但不要期望他们把国家回到它的教育黄金时代，压根就没有这种人。
editorial英文
"Chinese Students Are Eating America's Lunch."
“中国学生将和美国人争饭碗”
Only partly true. The biggest headline from the recent PISA results concerned the first-place performance of students from Shanghai, and the inevitable "the Chinese are eating our lunch" meme was hard for American commentators and policymakers to resist. "While Shanghai's appearance at the top might have been a stunner, America's mediocre showing was no surprise," declared a USA Today editorial.