Jeremy Ayers 'Make Rural Schools A Priority'

How to boost the level of education of American children is a contentious issue in today’s political world. With the United States falling further and further behind other industrialized nations in the areas of math and science, it is obvious that something needs to be done to keep our intellectual edge over other nations, so that we may maintain our position at the head of the global economy. In Jeremy Ayers brief, “Make Rural Schools a Priority,” he argues that the United States government needs to focus on overhauling the funding that goes into public education using the style of a policy brief, jargonized diction, and straightforward use and application of logos to give his argument legitimacy and weight. Ayers’ brief starts out by establishing the importance of rural schools in America. He brings up the number of rural schools and the fact that they’ve had a faster growth rate in student enrollment than the national average. He gives the statistics that “enrollment grew 15 percent between 2002 and 2005, an increase of 1.3 million students. That compares to only one percent growth in nationwide enrollment during the same time period” (Ayers). He follows this by conceding there is not set standard for what constitutes a rural school, except that at most it serves a town with a population less than

The short paragraphs and bulleted proposals serve to make it easy to digest and comprehend the major points but the clinical nature of the format lends it legitimacy and makes Ayers seem like an authority on the issue he is discussing. One example of how these bulleted proposals make the paper easier to comprehend is when he mentions his proposal for the eligibility criteria of “Targeted Grants” (Ayers). He then mentions a proposal that the “authorized amount for each district would be the product of four