It's a bit late in the game for me to be analyzing the rhetorical strategies in project 3, since I've completed the project itself, but in order to properly complete the assigned blog posts I'm going to throw it back to mid-April and try to give an assessment of what Project 3 was all about:
- For Project 3, I drew on my personal experiences as a TA in chemistry. Since I've gotten to see a lot of freshmen students coming straight out of high school, I felt like I had an unusually good understanding of how prepared high schoolers are for college-level chemistry. That is why I felt it was appropriate to talk about how the achievement gap for high-schoolers is likely exaggerated and being used as an excuse for why public schools are being replaced by charter schools.
- To be honest, my personal bias in this project was somewhat limited. I don't have particularly strong opinions about charter schools versus public schools. However, when I did the research into the effects that shutting down public schools has on urban students, I felt like spending more federal dollars on charter schools likely punishes those students. At that point, I started thinking about whether this transition from public to charter school was really necessary, and the people who would actually be interested in making that change. However, I am quite liberal socially, so I am certainly opposed to most conservative libertarian viewpoints, so using them as a scapegoat in this argument likely stemmed from that bias.
- My audience for project 3 was primarily liberals who support the creation of charter school systems. I was appealing primarily to them because I was targeting those who might be swayed by people posing arguments in favor of charter schools that really have an alternative agenda in mind. I assumed that my audience was against such notions as liassez-faire capitalism and the privatization of education. Thus, by trying to show how the charter school debate is being used to privatize education, I assumed this would be viewed as a negative by most readers.
- After reading my essay, I would want my audience to oppose the creation of additional charter schools with federal funding. Perhaps just as importantly, I would want them to ee how the unpreparedness of high schoolers for college is primarily a myth (at least from my perspective). Students today are diligent and in a highly competitive environment that likely hasn't been emulated before. Instead, this type of propaganda is spread to continue divesting money away from poor-performing schools and towards high-achieving schools that supposedly are underpreparing their students for college. For this to work, I needed them to understand what the propaganda being spread is, and how this is being misinterpreted today as pro-charter schools when it's really anti-urban students.
- For this project, I used the standard college essay genre. The audience definitely expects my sources to be cited at the end of the paper, with citations in-text. Additionally, they expect a title that describe the purpose of the essay but is still relatively catchy. A double-spaced paper is likely appropriate (and it is the style I chose). Finally, there should be an introduction that clearly states a unique thesis, so that the essay is not merely descriptive but rather argumentative. I think important conventions in this genre include the argumentative nature of the thesis that allows for a strong viewpoint. Additionally, the active citation of sources adds credibility to the format, because it is presented in-text and these sources are immediately accessible.
- There are certainly historical events that were relevant to my project. The enormous rise in the number of charter schools and their relative proportion of the education budget has had a tremendous toll on public school systems. This effect on public schools has particularly hit certain communities hard. When I researched the topic, I found that Philadelphia was particularly affected and I focused on that city's school system for several of my statistics. I was able to find many media sources focusing on the controversty, including the Washington Post, Huffington Post, Education Week and CBS
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