Riley's Discouse Analyisis Write-up #1

Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne, and Greg J. Duncan. "The Effects of Poverty on Children." Future of Children. 7.2 (1997): 55-71. Print.

This article works to persuade the reader that early child hood education for those in poverty will help in the long run to decrease poverties influence among children. Although the article doesn’t state it directly they seem to imply that it may perhaps decrease poverty all together. One of the major assumptions I read in this article is that “Children cannot alter family conditions by themselves, at least until they approach adulthood” (55). Although most this would not question this, I believe children do have some level of influence, however small or even unconscious it may be. Therefore I would definitely say that this is the most overt assumption in the text. Another big assumption is that “poor families are more likely to be headed by a parent who is single, has low educational attainment, is unemployed, has low earning potential, and is young” (55). This is stated as an example but since there is no comment as to whether it is meant to represent a common misconception or is a statement I am unsure what is truly meant by it. That is why I think it is an assumption. Either way the writer would still be stating something that is not nessicarily true and thus showing a bias of sorts.
Outside of the introduction and conclusion the paper took on a rather neutral tone. However since this article is based mostly off of statistics there are still several biases present. They are difficult to point out directly though because they don’t all nessicarily belong to the authors. I tried to find things left out in the statistics but since it doesn’t state how the studies were conducted and whom they were conducted on I found it nearly impossible. In the article the authors are quoting a series of other studies done, and have combined them to suit their purposes. I believe this is actually a good thing though. It takes studies that alone are considered insufficient and combines them into something more complete and understandable. They seemed to cover everything, health, schooling, birthrates, government help, programs, and so on. I was a little leery of the statistics provided on more abstract issues like emotional problems, and parental abilities. These I would think would be nearly impossible to record accurately, especially in such a large population of people. There are a variety of variables present that could alter the results dramatically. I could be wrong though.
There are also two major binaries that I noticed in the article. The first one, stated in the abstract, is not entirely obvious. They state that, “The timing of poverty also seems to be important for certain child outcomes. Children who experience poverty during their preschool and early school years have lower rates of school completion than children and adolescents who experience poverty only in later years” (55). I am still kind of struggling with whether this is a binary or just a general statement. They seem to be comparing older and younger children who live in poverty, the major tie breaker being who is in greater need. They follow this ideal throughout the paper though and into the conclusion which makes me think it is more than just a general statement. The more obvious binary is that between poor and non-poor children. They often compare the two, the poor children almost always winning out as in the most need in every category. This allows the reader to use non-poor children as a control group of sorts. Following the idea stated on page 73 of writing analytically that one cannot exist with the other.
Over all I honesty found the article very interesting and got a lot of information out of it. I am beginning to think based on this article alone that the major argument on this topic is over the benefit of early childhood education. However I have not yet come across any opposition to it so it will be interesting to find out if there is any and why people disagree with it.