Cultural Analysis of "Arne Duncan blasts House effort to revise No Child Left Behind"

In the blog post below, I will be analyzing one of the three articles I provided in my Evaluation of Rhetorical Situations post from our last deadline. This analysis will be done following some of the proposed tasks from Writing Public Lives.

I ended up deciding to analyze School Funding Inequality Makes Education "Separate and Unequal", Arne Duncan Says.

Cultural Keywords:

Kit, "Old Keys", 9/20/06 via Flickr.com

• Needy
• Inequality
• Republican
• Funding

THESIS: Education Secretary Arne Duncan fears that there is an incredibly evident funding inequality between privileged and needy schools, the majority of funding being dealt to more privileged districts, and feels that Republicans are pushing to only widen the gap with new policies.

The cultural key words of this article are a key point in the construction of the argument. They are the driving points that relate the general idea of the article, education funding inequality, to the modern concerns with general targeted mistreatment and political negligence toward specific groups. The term needy is used as a stand in for a broader group of minorities, disabled, and impoverished, all of which are heated topics of cultural conflict. The article as a whole is geared toward liberals, who actively oppose Republican policy and typically have strong opinions favoring the minority groups mentioned in the article. Though the use of these key words, it's easy for the author to evoke a response which generally agrees with what they are claiming.