ENGL147 Week 1 | General English in English - Chamberlain university

Question 31For questions 31-35: Review the following body paragraph, and identify the selected components about paragraph construction and source incorporation in the questions below. Each question is worth 3 points: This problem resulted on the one hand from national concern with global competition. When Sputnik rose into the sky in 1957 and Americans were concerned that Russians were outgunning us in the Space Race, millions of dollars were poured into math and science programs to bolster teaching and resultant learning in these subjects. The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act helped to fund these efforts. Confidence in our educational system was renewed when Americans set foot on the moon in 1969, but by 1983, it had eroded. Its quality so alarmed the government that its 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, warned that a “rising tide of mediocrity” would undermine this country’s place in the competitive 20th century (as cited in Zhao, 2006, p. 28). By 2001, the Bush administration authorized the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, which began in 2002 and runs parallel in thinking and intent to the Race to the Top (RTT) initiative, started under the Obama administration in 2009. NCLB mandated high-stakes tests for all states and imposed a carrots-and-sticks strategy of rewards and punishments if test scores were not consistently high. According to Nichols, Glass, and Berliner (2012), in their in-depth analysis of NAEP data, the thinking is that students and teachers will work and learn more if there are serious rewards or punishments; teachers get financial rewards and schools are lauded by the media if they do well, but teachers face termination, schools face closures, and students are retained or not allowed to graduate if they do poorly. Furthermore, it is thought that tests help produce a world-class education by encouraging students to reach their full potential, improving our collective productivity, and reestablishing our competitiveness on a global scale (Madaus & Russell, 2010). What is the topic sentence in this body paragraph?