Natasha Athey

Wall Street Journal Rhetorical Analysis

Draft 1
10/3/14

The audience for The Best Language for Math is probably parents. I imagine one
parent involved in a financial business interested in the U.S.-Asian math gap as it corresponds
with the U.S.s intertwined economic interests with Asian countries and one, possibly stay-athome, parent. I say stay-at-home parent because the article also includes some resources
available online for helping children with mathematics, and it talks about playing board games
with the child to help them learn counting. I was also really interested in this as an educator; I
could see how teachers would be attracted to this article for the resources mentioned and the
ideas about board games in the article.
For Should Children Be Held Back for Kindergarten?, I found that the article was
highly geared towards mothers of children who are approaching kindergarten age. For instance,
in the first sentence, it mentions Erin Odom and her husband, not Mr. and Mrs. Odum or
something referencing both of the parents equally. Im not insinuating that how the author,
Jennifer Breheny Wallace, wrote this in the wrong way; I just thought it was interesting that the
article focuses heavily on mothers. This article presents a lot of facts and figures talking about
the dangers of having large age gaps in the classroom, especially for younger students in the
classroom, but at the end of the article it does reference Samuel Wang who wrote a book which
gives evidence that students not held back can actually be beneficial for younger students in the
classroom, and Dr. Meg Meeker who says that holding a child back can actually cause
psychological harm. All in all, I think that Wallace tries to give a well-rounded view of the issue

Natasha Athey
Wall Street Journal Rhetorical Analysis
Draft 1
10/3/14
of holding children back, but the rhetorical strategies that she uses suggest that the article is
holding up the view that parents should think hard about holding children back, but that there is
data that would support them to do so.
U.S. Schools Get Low Marks from Chamber of Commerce targets a different audience
than The Best Language for Math and Should Children Be Held Back for Kindergarten.
Even the sub-header says much about the bias of this article: Business Group Says Not Enough
Progress Is Being Made in Preparing Students for Workforce. The article comes from a
perspective that schools are for educating students to go into the workforce, especially in
business-orientated professions. At the top of the article, there is even a chart (note from me: is
that called a chart? A graph? Just a picture? I wasnt sure.) of data measuring K-12 schools
across the United States on academic performance on business-oriented criteria. The article also
mentions Massachusetts having higher math scores than many countries in a particular group
something that many people are very interested in, as data has been shown that the United States
lags behind many countries in mathematics scores. I personally think that this is blatantly
manipulating certain variables by the author in order to prove that the U.S. is not lagging
behind in mathematics, which is what many conservatives and readers of the Wall Street Journal
would like to hear. Caroline Porter, the author of this article, seems to have written a lot of
articles about the school system in the United States, and a lot of them seem to be to be
supporting a rightward-leaning slant. At the end of U.S. Schools Get Low Marks from Chamber
of Commerce, Porter includes a paragraph talking about the importance of local businesses

Natasha Athey
Wall Street Journal Rhetorical Analysis
Draft 1
10/3/14
helping to shape the public schools in their community. Especially from this part of the article, I
conclude that while this article might be interesting to parents of schoolchildren, the article is
geared more towards those interested in public school systems as a whole; perhaps business
owners interested in the school system, or business owners needing to see what the workforce is
going to look like and who they are going to hire.
Overall, the rhetorical strategies in these three Wall Street Journal articles seem to use
rhetoric well, and I found the target audiences to be pretty well-defined.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-best-language-for-math1410304008?tesla=y&mod=WSJ_WSJ_Careers_PublicSearch&mg=reno64-wsj
http://online.wsj.com/articles/should-children-be-held-back-for-kindergarten1410536168?tesla=y&mod=WSJ_WSJ_Careers_PublicSearch&mg=reno64-wsj
http://online.wsj.com/articles/u-s-schools-get-low-marks-from-chamber-of-commerce1410449189?tesla=y&mod=WSJ_WSJ_Careers_PublicSearch&mg=reno64-wsj
http://topics.wsj.com/person/A/biography/7414