Suggested Answers to the First Short Quiz

SUB-TEXT -- WHY OUR POLITICIANS AND MAINSTREAM MEDIA ARE TRYING TO DISTRACT US WITH INCIDENTS OF ALLEGED POLICE BRUTALITY RATHER THAN FOCUSING ON WHAT REALLY AILS OUR INNER CITIES!!!

In addition to our normal Participant Comments including our Short Quizzes and Suggested Answers Thereto, click here for John Karls’ 5/10/2015 posting entitled AMERICA’S APARTHEID “JUSTICE” SYSTEM -- BALTIMORE, AMERICAN INNER-CITIES AND TOM BRADY which occupied the first three sections of the face of this bulletin board until 5/14/2015.
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johnkarls
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Suggested Answers to the First Short Quiz

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Question 1

Why, as we have studied many times in the past, does the U.S. rank DEAD LAST among industrialized nations in terms of virtually every measure of civilization (e.g., infant mortality, literacy, life expectancy, upward mobility, etc., etc.)?

Answer 1

Please see Q&A-2 through Q&A-6.

Question 2

Who said “The poor you will always have with you”? Was He right?

Answer 2

Jesus Christ. [Matthew 26:11; Mark 14:7; John 12:8]

He also said that there are only TWO commandments for “inheriting eternal life” = (1) Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and (2) love your neighbor as yourself -- whereupon immediately follows the Parable of The Good Samaritan to drive home the point that EVERYONE is your neighbor.

[Indeed, any lawyers looking for loopholes are cut off from the potential argument that enemies may not be neighbors by Christ saying in the Sermon on the Mount that you are required to Love Your Enemies which is just a corollary of Love Your Neighbor!!!]

[And yes, the Roman Catholic Church is WRONG that the famous TEN Commandments have anything to do with Christianity -- they are 10 of the 613 Commandments of Judaism and have nothing to do with Christianity UNLESS Christ was a liar when He said there are only TWO Commandments for “inheriting eternal life.”]

Sorry to beat around the bush as background.

Though a correct analysis of what Christ said leads to a lot of interesting results, such as viewing St. Paul as a heretic on the many occasions when he railed against homosexuals (vs. loving them as St. Paul loved himself) as reported in The Bible -- rather than the Roman Catholic Church’s insistence that homosexuality is a sin, based on St. Paul’s heresies.

But how does all this relate to the poor???

Whether a Christian is required to “give all you have to the poor and come and follow [Him]” as is stated in the Story of the Rich Young Ruler does NOT even have to be debated!!!

Because the SECOND Commandment (aka The Golden Rule) requires loving one’s neighbor as one’s self and doing so would require one to give all her/his possessions away to poorer neighbors until one is as poor as the poorest person on earth.

Indeed, members of most, if not all, Roman Catholic Orders take Vows of Poverty -- perhaps Franciscans are the most famous for it.

So was Christ correct that “the poor you will always have with you”???

Personally, I would like to think that He only meant that getting everyone to obey The Golden Rule would not happen during the lifetimes of the followers to whom He said that!!!

And that it would be possible for us to do better!!!

Though I recognize that human nature means that the Las Vegas odds of that ever happening must be prohibitive!!!

Enough already!!!

Question 3

What statistics does Prof. Diane Ravitch cite for the size of America’s Permanent Under-Caste?

Answer 3

Prof. Ravitch states (p. 94): “The latest report from UNICEF says that it [the rate of childhood poverty in the United States] is 23 percent.

This should not be surprising since, as we have studied many times, the U.S. government has continually reported for the last 50 years that 30% of American adults are illiterate as defined in terms of the ability to read the warning label on a can of rat poison.

Question 4

Do other industrialized countries have Permanent Under-Castes of their own?

Answer 4

No.

As also reported by Prof. Ravitch based on the UNICEF statistics (p. 94) --

“No other advanced nation tolerates this level of poverty [America’s 23%, as reported in Q&A-3]. In Finland, which has an excellent school system, 5 percent of the nation’s children live in poverty. The U.S. rate for child poverty is about double the rate found in such countries as the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. It is triple the rate of child poverty in Germany, Austria, and France. And it is quadruple the rate of child poverty in such nations as Denmark, Slovenia, Norway, the Netherlands, Cyprus, Finland and Iceland.”

Question 5

How did America create its Permanent Under-Caste?

Answer 5

In broad terms, following the Civil War, African Americans flocked to the major industrialized cities to find employment, in response to which white Americans abandoned the cities for the suburbs.

Public education K-12 has always been funded largely by property taxes and America’s inner-cities that had been abandoned by “white flight” had comparatively little property per capita to tax.

Attempts to equalize opportunity such as busing were largely confined to the cities themselves and did NOT involve the suburbs to any great extent.

The last “nail in the coffin” vis-à-vis even busing within a city was provided by U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts who ruled in Parents Involved In Community Schools vs. Seattle School District No. 1 (551 U.S. 701 (2007)) that the Constitution does NOT impose a duty to desegregate schools if the desegregation is based on housing patterns -- in other words, based on isolating America’s Permanent Under-Caste in the Ghettos that are our inner cities.

Question 6

Given the size of America’s Permanent Under-Caste and the fact that other industrialized countries have NOT created Permanent Under-Castes of their own, is there any mystery why the U.S. ranks DEAD LAST among industrialized nations in terms of virtually every measure of civilization (e.g., infant mortality, literacy, life expectancy, upward mobility, etc., etc.)?

Answer 6

Of course not!!!

Though it would be interesting to know whether America tops each list if its Permanent Under-Caste is eliminated from the calculation of each statistic.

Question 7

What is the Snake Oil claim which is NEVER accompanied by any proof and which is made by the purveyors of the school-privatization movement (such as vouchers and school choice) regarding the comparative effectiveness of charter schools vs. public schools?

Answer 7

The Snake Oil claim is that charter schools are superior to public schools.

Question 8

What is the TRUTH about this Snake Oil claim by the only two definitive studies, one of which was even funded, to their embarrassment based on the results, by the mega-foundations that have been purveying school privatization -- as reported by Prof. Ravitch in “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education” which was the focus of our 9/12/2012 meeting?

Answer 8

In “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” Prof. Ravitch chronicled that by the 1990’s, Voucher Programs and Voucher Schools had faded from the scene and been replaced by Charter Schools.

The effectiveness of Charter Schools is best summed up at p. 142 of “Death and Life” –

“A national study in 2009 concluded that students in most charter schools performed no better than those in traditional public schools. Researchers at Stanford University, led by economist Margaret E. Raymond, analyzed data from 2,403 charter schools in fifteen states and the District of Columbia (about half of all charters and 70 percent of all charter students in the nation at the time) and found that 37 percent had learning gains that were significantly below those of local public schools; 46 percent had gains that were no different; and only 17 percent showed growth that was significantly better…The results were sobering, especially since the study was funded by such pro-charter groups as the Walton Family Foundation and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.”

And at p. 143 of “Death and Life” –

“A summary of research on charter schools by Tom Loveless and Katharyn Field of the Brookings Institution in 2009 found, as one might expect, a large divide between advocates and critics of these schools. Some researchers found positive effects, some found negative effects, but on the whole ‘NONE OF THE STUDIES DETECTS HUGE EFFECTS – EITHER POSITIVE OR NEGATIVE.’ Their review also indicated that charters probably promoted racial segregation, since parents chose schools ‘with a racial profile matching their own.’” (All-caps emphasis added.)

Question 9

What is the Snake Oil claim which is NEVER accompanied by any proof and which is made by the purveyors of the school-privatization movement (such as vouchers and school choice) regarding whether America’s public schools are “broken” and “failing”?

Answer 9

The Snake Oil claim is that America’s public schools ARE “broken” and “failing.”

Question 10

What is the TRUTH about this Snake Oil claim according to the only available data capable of evaluating such claims -- as reported by Prof. Ravitch in "Reign of Error, the Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to American Public Schools" which is the focus for our 6/17/2015 meeting?

Answer 10

Prof. Ravitch states (p. 44 of “Reign of Error”): “We have only one authoritative measure of academic performance over time, and that is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as NAEP (pronounced “nape”). NAEP is part of the U.S. Department of Education. It has an independent governing board, called the National Assessment Governing Board. By statute, the governing board is bipartisan and consists of teachers, administrators, state legislators, governors, businesspeople, and members of the general public.”

The NAEP takes two forms. The “long-term trend assessment” NAEP has been used since 1973 and is still in use. It tests thoroughly students age 9, age 13 and age 17 selected as scientific samples large enough to provide reliable statistical breakdowns on such things as subject (e.g., verbal, math) and race.

The so-called “Main NAEP” has only been used since 1990. The principal difference between the two NAEP’s is that the “Main NAEP” questions are continually revamped whereas the questions in the “long-term trend assessment” NAEP are rarely changed and then, only to reflect such things as “S&H Green Stamps” going out of existence requiring a substitution of something that still exists.

Prof. Ravitch analyzes NAEP scores at length in Chapter 5 (“The Facts About Test Scores”) and Chapter 6 (“The Facts About the Achievement Gap”).

In summary though, she reports that both NAEP tests show steady improvement in every category over the entire period measured by each test.

And that the Achievement Gap between African Americans and white American students has steadily narrowed over the entire period measured by each test. Indeed, she reports that the current levels of achievement of today’s African Americans EXCEEDS the achievement levels of yesterday’s white Americans of not so long ago.

By way of footnote (figuratively speaking), Prof. Ravitch DOES note that the NAEP statistics can be misread by anyone who is unaware of SIMPSON’S PARADOX.

Statisticians recognize the paradox that if the overall proportion of a particular group increases, then its influence on the overall result also increases.

In plain English, if suburban parents do not have as many children as inner-city parents, then the lower achievement scores of the increasing percentage of inner-city children produces an overall “flat line” in the NAEP scores, even though the achievement levels of both the suburban children and the inner-city children are increasing.

Question 11

Why do the purveyors of the school-privatization movement insist that the SINGLE-DIGIT graduation rates for our inner-city high schools are an EDUCATION problem rather than a SOCIOLOGY problem and that their school-privatization proposals (such as vouchers and school choice) make any more sense than closing a police precinct in whose jurisdiction a crime is committed and hiring amateurs in their place?

Answer 11

What do you think??? Let’s discuss!!!

Question 12

Now that America’s unique Permanent Under-Caste has caused it to rank DEAD LAST in terms of virtually every measure of civilization, will the purveyors of the school-privatization movement (such as vouchers and school choice) succeed in sending America back to The Stone Age?

Answer 12

What do you think??? Let’s discuss!!!

Question 13

Will their success in sending America back to The Stone Age be based on the principle that if falsehoods are repeated often enough, they are accepted as truth?

Answer 13

What do you think??? Let’s discuss!!!

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