【编者按】精品学习网英语四六级频道为大家收集整理了“2012年英语四级阅读辅导”供大家参考，希望对大家有所帮助!
2012年英语四级快读阅读又选自《The Daily Beast》!(《每日野兽》，美国新闻网站，由《纽约客》前总编蒂娜·布朗创办)这是该网站2008年的一篇文章，基本一字未改。看来，四六级选材的来源不再局限于《卫报》，而是越来越广泛了哦。
Small Schools Rising
This year's list of the top 100 high schools shows that today, those with fewer students are flourishing.
Fifty years ago, they were the latest thing in educational reform: big, modern, suburban high schools with students counted in the thousands. As baby boomers came of high-school age, big schools promised economic efficiency, a greater choice of courses, and, of course, better football teams. Only years later did we understand the trade-offs this involved: the creation of lumbering bureaucracies, the difficulty of forging personal connections between teachers and students. SAT scores began dropping in 1963; today, on average, 30 percent of students do not complete high school in four years, a figure that rises to 50 percent in poor urban neighborhoods. While the emphasis on teaching to higher, test-driven standards embodied in No Child Left Behind resulted in significantly better performance in elementary (and some middle) schools, high schools for a variety of reasons seemed stuck in a rut.
Size isn't everything, but it does matter, and the past decade has seen a noticeable countertrend toward smaller schools. This has been fostered, in part, by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has invested $1.8 billion in American high schools, helping to open about 1,000 small schools—most of them with about 400 kids each, with an average enrollment of only 150 per grade. About 500 more are on the drawing board. Districts all over the country are taking notice, along with mayors in cities like New York, Chicago, Milwaukee and San Diego. The movement includes independent public charter schools, such as No. 1 BASIS in Tucson, with only 120 high-schoolers and 18 graduates this year. It embraces district-sanctioned magnet schools, such as the Talented and Gifted School, with 198 students, and the Science and Engineering Magnet, with 383, which share a building in Dallas, as well as the City Honors School in Buffalo, N.Y., which grew out of volunteer evening seminars for students. And it includes alternative schools with students selected by lottery, such as H-B Woodlawn in Arlington, Va. And most conspicuous of all, there is the phenomenon of large urban and suburban high schools that have split up into smaller units of a few hundred, generally housed in the same sprawling grounds that once boasted thousands of students all marching to the same band.
Hillsdale High School in San Mateo, Calif., is one of those, ranking No. 423—among the top 2 percent in the country—on NEWSWEEK's annual ranking of America's top high schools. The success of small schools is apparent in the listings. Ten years ago, when the first NEWSWEEK list based on college-level test participation was published, only three of the top 100 schools had graduating classes smaller than 100 students. This year there are 22. Nearly 250 schools on the full NEWSWEEK list of the top 5 percent of schools nationally, available on Newsweek.com, had fewer than 200 graduates in 2007.