Few ideas in education are more controversial than vouchers—letting parents choose to educate their children wherever they wish at the taxpayer's expense. The principle is compellingly simple.The state pays;parents choose;schools compete;standards rise;everybody gains. Simple, perhaps, butit has aroused predictable—and often fatal—opposition from the educational establishment.Letting parents choose where to educate their children is a silly idea;professionals know best. Co-operation, not competition, is the way to improve education for all. Vouchers would increase inequality because children who are hardest to teach would be left behind.

But these arguments are now succumbing to sheer weight of evidence.Voucher schemes are running in several different countries without ill-effects for social cohesion;those that use a lottery to handout vouchers offer proof that recipients get a better education than those that do not.In several American states, the voucher pupils did better eventhough the state spent less than it would have done had the children been educated in normal state schools. American voucher schemes typically offer private schools around half of what the state would spend if the pupils stayed in public schools.

These results are important because they strip out other influences. Home, neighbourhood and natural ability all affect results more than which school a child attends. If the pupils who received vouchers differ from those who don’t—perhaps simply by coming from the sort of go-getting family that elbows its way to the front of every queue—any effect might simply be the result of any number of other factors. But assigning the vouchers randomly guarded against this risk.Opponents still argue that those who exercise choice will be the most able and committed, and by clustering themselves together in better schools they will abandon the weak and voiceless to languish in rotten ones.Some cite the example of Chile, where a universal voucher scheme that allows schools to charge top-up fees seems to have improved the education of the best-off most.

The strongest evidence against this criticism comes from Sweden, where parents are freer than those in almost any other country to spend as they wish the money the government allocates to educating their children. Sweeping education reforms in 1992 not only relaxed enrolment rules in the state sector, allowing students to attend schools outside their own municipality, but also let them take their state funding to private schools, including religious ones and those operating for profit. The only real restrictions imposed on private schools were that they must run their admissions on a first-come-first-served basis and promise not to charge top-up fees. The result has been burgeoning variety and a rapid expansion of the private sector. At the time of the reforms only around 1% of Swedish students were educated privately; now 10% are， and growth in private schooling continues unabated.

More evidence that choice can raise standards for all comes from Caroline Hoxby, an economistat Havard University, who has shown that when American public schoos must compete for their students with schools that accept vouchers, their performance

improves. Swedish researchers say the same. It seems that those who work in state schoo are just like everybody else: they do better when confronted by abit of competition.

1. We learn from the beginning of the passage that vouchers_______.

A. have evoked different opinions in the educational circle

B. have gained unanimous support in the American society

C. encourage cooperation among educational establishments

D. can help promote equal distribution of educational resources

2. Speaking of voucher schemes in Paragraph 2, the author implies that_______.

A. they are always carried out in the way of lottery

B. they can damage social cohesion

C. they are proved to be of help and value

D. they should be adopted by every country

3. In the view of the “opponents” mentioned in the third paragraph, _______.

A. students should pick up their schools randomly so that good students can be equally distributed among schools

B. Chile's voucher schemes have improved the education of the most able and committed students

C. the right to choose good schools by paying top-up fee serves to improve education

D. students from different family backgrounds are supposed to goto different schools

4. The phrase “burgeoning variety” (Line 7, Paragraph 4) most probably means_______.

A. fast development

B. increasing popularity

C. increasing diversity

D. a larger number

5.We learn from the last paragraph that _______.

A. Swedish parents can only send their kids to schools within their own city

B. the education reform in Sweden is mainy to set up voucher schemes

C. the Harvard economist disagrees with Swedish researchers on vouchers

D. competion is an incentive to spur public schoos to improve their teaching