Directions: Read the Following Excerpt Adapted from the Sociology Textbook

question 6

True/False

Directions: Read the following excerpt adapted from the sociology textbook Sociology in a Changing World by William Kornblum. and apply the knowledge you have gained about research reports from Chapter 12 to select the best answer for the following questions. (Assume that the missing paragraphs are part of the research report.)
School Choice
¹ One of the most controversial issues confronting education institutions today is that of school choice. Among conservative school reformers, school choice often means plans to allow students to choose private schools as well as public ones by giving parents vouchers to pay for tuition and leaving them free to decide where and how they will use the vouchers. These "free-market" school choice plans have been popular among conservatives since the 1950s, when economist Milton Friedman first suggested this approach. In fact, parents and citizens should understand that "school choice" involves several types of choices, and all taxpayers should be familiar with their outcomes (Kornblum, 2012).
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²At this writing, a great deal of research is being conducted to evaluate one or another of the school choice initiatives. Note, however, that the range of choice is so wide that no single study can demonstrate the overall effect of school choice on all the desirable outcomes of education (for example, knowledge, mobility, equality, morality, citizenship). And there are so many actual school choice behaviors-including moving to better school districts, homeschooling children, vouchers or education grants, and the choice among parochial, private, and public schools-that researchers are hard-pressed to respond to the challenges presented by these changes in educational institutions (Fuller &Ellmore, 1996). But most liberal critics of school choice plans are afraid that although greater choice is attractive to parents in poor school districts as well as to those in more affluent ones, the overall consequence of increasing choices among different types of schools will be to increase the segregation of students by class and race. And as such segregation increases, so will rate of failure in schools that have been abandoned by better students and more aware parents (Torres & Mitchell, 1998). Indeed, from this critical perspective, increasing racial segregation in public and private education can already be viewed as an outcome of school choice.
³Early results of social-scientific evaluations of student achievement provide little support for school choice and cash vouchers as superior to public schools. In a three-year study of Washington, D.C. primary schools, 1,300 students from low-income families were chosen by lot from about 20,000 applicants for cash payments that enabled them to choose a religious or secular private school and to attend that school for at least four years, beginning in the fourth grade. After three years at these schools, the students who received vouchers performed no better on standardized test than a control group of students who remained in the public schools (Wolf, Howell, & Peterson, 2000).
The writer concludes from research that school choice and cash vouchers are a better option for students than attending their designated public school.

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Definitions:

Artificial Consequences

These are outcomes or sanctions that are deliberately created or imposed to modify behavior, rather than naturally occurring as a result of actions.

Naturally Occurring

An event, substance, or situation that exists or happens without human intervention.

Problem-solving Process

A systematic approach to addressing and finding solutions for complex problems, involving identifying the problem, generating alternatives, and implementing solutions.

Self-reports

A method of data collection where individuals provide information about themselves, often used in surveys, questionnaires, and research studies.