ISS1120 Midterm Review

What is the experience for those immigrating to the U.S. to work in the unskilled labor market?

they make good money because our "low-wage" jobs are "high-wage" jobs for them.

According to Harriet Bernstein the word "because" does not appear in most U.S. textbooks before the eighth grade.

true

American interest in education goes back to earliest colonial times.

true

Britain has a national curriculum, tested by national exams.

true

Community colleges are no longer regarded primarily as institutions preparing students to enter four- year colleges.

true

Discussions of mobility often overlook one simple fact: Room at the top is always limited.

true

The slave trade out of Africa occurred:

as early as 900 a.d.

In 2005, the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics reported which ethnic group to have the highest unemployment?

blacks

Most subjects in social science can be isolated for purposes of study:

but in reality they are not isolated

The Emancipation Proclamation changed the legal status of slaves:

but not their social status

Except in rare cases all members of a family are regarded as belonging to the same social stratum.

true

Hispanics with historical and cultural ties to Latin American are called Latinos

true

Homosexuals experience discrimination in the U.S.

true

Horizontal mobility has reduced class consciousness in the U.S.

true

In the early 1990s, when immigration into the United States reached its peak, some 1 million persons were arriving every year.

true

Most early Arab immigrants were from Lebanon and Syria.

true

Most modern industrial societies do not have formal stratification systems.

true

People learn in different ways and various groups respond differently to alternative learning environments.

true

Race is a social construction only loosely based on a few biological differences

true

Some claim that blacks in the U.S. are stratified as a caste system, like in India.

true

The medieval estate system was better suited to a static society.

true

The people of every society can always be divided into groups.

true

The school structure of the U.S. is quite different from what is traditional in most countries.

true

An open-class system is one in which

class lines are not definite

The most striking expansion of education in the twentieth century has been in the:

colleges and universities

Segregation that occurs because of social and cultural, not legal, reasons is called:

de facto segregation

Many argue that there has been a(n. _____________ in the effectiveness of education over the past decades.

decline

Any class system is somewhat inconsistent with the:

democratic ideal of equal opportunity

Today, almost 100 percent of children from the ages of five to seventeen are in school at least some days every school year.

true

In 1986 the mandatory retirement age was:

eliminated for most occupations

Today, slightly less than half of the students who entered college as first-year students failed to get degrees.

true

Under the caste system an individual acquired a social position at birth.

true

In the U.S. in the late nineteenth century we developed a so-called:

unitary school system

A group of people who identify with each other on the basis of common ancestry and cultural heritage is called a(n):

ethnic group

30% of all schoolchildren in the U.S. attend private schools.

false

Anti-Semitism has been eliminated in the U.S.

false

By 2012 the number of students in colleges and universities had increased more than eight times, to more than 60 million.

false

Chronological age often reflects a person's mental age or capacity to work and contribute to society.

false

Credentializing is a positive term for excellence in education.

false

Defining poverty is easy for social scientists.

false

From 1960 to 2011, the percentage of blacks completing four years of college rose from 3 percent to about 41.5 percent.

false

Greg Duncan and colleagues compared class mobility between 1968-1979 and 1980-1987 and found that the incidence of upward mobility for those in the lower class increased.

false

In 1950 the U.S. government finally apologized to the surviving Japanese Americans who had been interned.

false

Karl Marx believed capitalistic exploitation would lead to an increase in the condition of the worker.

false

Max Weber argued that property is the sole basis of class.

false

Research has found that attending independent schools leads children towards isolation, narrow interests, and poor socialization.

false

Since 1954 no major civil rights laws have been passed in the U.S.

false

Social classes are clear-cut entities.

false

The Equal Rights Amendment was ratified by two-thirds of the states

false

The Equal Rights Amendment was ratified by two-thirds of the states.

false

The U.S. economic class system is strongly developed.

false

The apartheid system is not like a caste system.

false

The assumption that race determines culture has strong scientific or factual basis

false

The college curriculum has evolved from an elective system to a rigid system.

false

The expression "liberal education" is associated with the attempt to give students a narrow specialized education.

false

The largest minority group in the United States is African-Americans.

false

The year 2000 was the first time the U.S. Census Bureau changed its race classification system.

false

Women in the U.S. are referred to as a minority group because there are less women than men in the population.

false

Affirmative Action programs are designed to:

favor minority groups

Scores on the 2011 SAT:

fell in all subject areas

College programs that are intended to broaden the intellectual horizon of students are called:

general education

Which group has the highest dropout rate?

hispanics

What effect is reform in public assistance programming believed to be having?

if it continues it will decrease the number of people on welfare

In an estate system, the position of an individual in society is nearly always:

inherited from parents

Groups of people singled out for unequal negative treatment and objects of discrimination are

minority groups

The movement to make social institutions unbiased with respect to all ethnic groups is called the:

multicuturalism movement

The modern influx of Mexican immigration came after 1900 and was:

not affected by the 1921-1924 quota laws

As a rule, the most important factors in determining social class are:

occupation, wealth and income

Differences in income arise directly from all of the following sources EXCEPT:

variations in taxes owed to the government each year

U.S. public education is designed to teach citizens to be literate so people can learn about politics and public policy to:

vote more intelligently and to choose leaders more wisely

What is true of socioeconomic hierarchies in American society since the 1930s?

we evolved into a society of middle class people

Historically, in the U.S. education is paid for largely by

property taxes

Max Weber argued that the basis of class was:

property, prestige, and power

Which is NOT a part of the reason the U.S. economic class system is not strongly developed?

social inequality

The combination of hierarchies-education, occupation, and income-forms an individual's:

socioeconomic status

When firmly established, social stratification contributes to social:

stability

What is true of some state funding of public schools in the past decade?

statewide taxation is used to fund schools

Women whose primary aim was to win the right to vote were called:

suffragettes

Jim Crow laws were part of the:

systematic legal segregation of blacks

The U.S. Supreme Court decided that at an undergraduate level admission points were too much like affirmative action. The court also held that in admission decisions colleges could:

take race into account

The first settlers of what is now the United States are called:

Indian Americans

The freedom of students and teachers to pursue, discuss and teach knowledge without hindrance or censorship is called:

academic freedom

Which of the following countries will pay for 90% of the cost of dissatisfied parents setting up their own school?

Denmark

U.S. educational institutions are:

a product of their history

In 1994, this act was passed, designed to ban discrimination against girls in school.

"gender equity in education act"

In 2012, U.S. education cost over:

1.1 trillion dollars

The U.S. Supreme Court outlawed public school segregation in:

1954

According to the census estimates, the total number of Americans in poverty in 2011 was about:

46 million

Social scientists argue that race is:

a social term, not a physical construction

Most sociologists today tend to use a form of:

Weber's concept of class

The U.S. government forcibly held West Coast people of Japanese descent in camps during:

World War II