Hello, My name is Ashton Reinholz and i am a dual enrollment student from glynn academy in Dr. McGennis’s english composition course. Today I will be conducting a podcast in order to provide a rhetorical analysis on an article by Roby Chatterji entitled “Fighting Systemic Racism in K-12 Education: Helping Allies Move From the Keyboard to the School Board.” This article was posted on The 8th of july, 2020 on the center for american progress website.
In this article, Roby describes the problems with the school systems in regards to equality between white and african american students and what people can do to help. Roby explains the different and best ways that people can help get more equality and equity in schools and how people this can occur. Roby goes on and gives examples.
In the beginning Roby doesnt even talk about racism in regards to education and instead elaborates about recent events regarding police brutality in order to grab the reader's attention by telling them things that they likely have heard about in the news. This can be seen in the article when Roby states, “The killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and others have galvanized calls and increased support for dramatic changes to policing and criminal justice policies.”
Roby then goes on to elaborate on the idea that advocating for equitable funding is a major step that needs to be taken for schools that are predominantly African american. One way in which he does this is by using unbiased statistics scout school funding such as, “This is one reason why predominantly nonwhite school districts across the country annually receive $23 billion less than their predominantly white counterparts.” Roby then goes on and explains how higher security and surveillance in schools can actually come across as a bad thing. He supports this with more data claiming “Additionally, recent data show that approximately 1.7 million students attend schools with police officers but no counselors; 3 million students attend schools with police but no nurses; 6 million students attend schools with police but no psychologist; and 10 million students attend schools with police but no social workers.” Which implies that he thinks that the money would be better spent social workers and not so much on security.