前程百利小编为大家带来托福阅读材料。文章的难词已经标示出来，希望大家可以学习到相关知识，并通过不断的阅读练习提高自己的托福阅读能力。
Education secretary Arne Duncan tells a story that was distressingly familiar for children of color(有色人种) before the implementation(实施) of the No Child Left Behind law. At his mother’s after-school tutoring program on the South Side of Chicago, he worked with a young man who thought he was headed to college. The student was on track to get his high school diploma(文凭)— on the honor roll, in fact, with a solid B average. But, Mr. Duncan discovered, his tutee(受辅导者，理解为学生即可;tutee是和tutor对应的、二者之间存在施受/上下关系的词;遵循类似变化的还有employer-employee，mentor-mentee) also was functionally illiterate(illiterate是文盲的，前边的副词起强调作用)。
In those years, no one was held accountable(应作解释的、负有责任的) for(注意介词，动词account表示是……的原因的词组也是accent for) student achievement, and schools routinely(一向) ignored and concealed the problems of struggling students, especially poor black and Hispanic students. Returning to that way of operating should be unthinkable(难以置信的), but that is unquestionably what will happen if testing and accountability requirements are gutted from() federal law.
Rewriting No Child Left Behind is a priority for Congress and the administration. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate education panel, aims to bring a bill to the Senate floor next month. Everyone agrees that the law, a product of bipartisan(两党拥护的) cooperation between President George W. Bush and the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, should be improved based on the experience of the past decade-plus. Some of its provisions(条款，规定) are overly punitive(严苛的) or prescriptive. But its underlying principle is sound(合理的): Schools need to know whether students are learning, and they should do something about it when they aren’t. Writing that principle into law was a civil rights achievement that must not be undone.
The achievement is threatened by an unholy alliance between conservatives(保守分子) who oppose any federal role in education and teacher unions(教师工会), which claim to favor progressive policies until those policies begin to bring accountability to the teaching profession. These opponents of the law, blowing a lot of smoke about “corporatist” reform, would like to eliminate the requirement that students be tested annually in math and reading in grades three to eight and once in high school. Mr. Alexander’s draft bill(草案) doesn’t take a stand on this, instead presenting a range of options in what the senator characterized as an attempt to start a dialogue about testing.
That dialogue should start with a fact: The law has worked. The performance of poor and minority students has improved in the past 10 to 15years. The Education Trust, advocates for closing the achievement gap, has catalogued the evidence in the performance of minority and low-income student son the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly described as the nation’s report card; in a rise in graduation rates; and in greater participation in college entrance and Advanced Placement tests(大家常说的AP考试).
Some districts may test too often or teach too much to the test. There is room to fix problems and, as we said, improve the law. But any member of Congress should be embarrassed to even contemplate(设想;这里是说取消考试的荒唐：任何一个国会议员，哪怕是稍稍往那个方向想一想，都应该感到羞愧) returning to an era when the absence of annual measurement allowed failure to be swept under the rug. Educational opportunity is, as Mr. Duncan said Monday, “a civil right, a moral imperative.” The country needs to ensure that no one is being denied that right.
以上就是前程百利小编为大家带来的托福阅读材料，平时的阅读练习是托福考试阅读备考的重要一环。希望大家利用好每份材料，尽可能多地从中获取知识。预祝大家托福考试取得好成绩。
