Question

Could anyone help me with explaining how each option is correct or incorrect for this question?

The primary purpose of the passage is to

A) call attention to a serious problem
B) justify the continuation of current policies
C) examine the advantages and disadvantages of policy changes
D) refute the allegations of critics
E) establish the need for additional data and studies

I understand that (A) is correct, but I don't know how to explain the process of getting that answer :/

Answer 1

The passage is:
Teachers’ salaries, expenditures per pupil, and other indicators of school quality (including the physical plant) significantly affect the employment prospects and wages of high school graduates. Yet unlike other nations, American schools are financed at the local rather than the federal level. If parents do not live in affluent communities . . . they have few ways of assuring a quality education . . . . And voters, many of them parents who believe they already “did their bit” by raising their own children, are becoming less and less willing to subsidize schools for “other” people’s kids. School bond failures are way up in comparison with earlier decades. At the same time, the property tax cuts of the 1970s and 1980s greatly decreased the resources available to schools.

Child advocate and educational researcher Jonathan Kozol reports that New York City spends half as much per student as surrounding suburbs. In 1992, the country’s forty-seven largest urban school districts spent nearly $900 less on each student than did their suburban counterparts—even though the urban schools were far more likely to have students needing special services. There are also substantial variations within school districts. Poorer neighborhoods . . . receive much lower public subsidies than affluent ones.

International comparisons reveal that education is simply not a national priority in the United States the way it is in many countries. We have a piecemeal, incoherent system that fails to train teachers thoroughly, keep track of student progress in a consistent way, or ensure equality of access. Things are no better in the work world. Only 1 percent of the funding employers devote to training goes towards raising basic skills, those most needed by young entry-level workers. Both publicly and privately funded education is heavily skewed against the apprenticeship programs and vocational training needed by youngsters whose parents cannot afford to send them to college. Government spending on employment and training programs, in inflation- adjusted dollars, is today only one-third of what it was in 1980. At the same time, the cost of higher education has soared, while loans and scholarships have been cut back.