Running Head: Analysis Essay Rough Draft4

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Truancy is not an issue that calls for punishment of parents and students. It is a national issue of poverty and racism that creates truant students in the United States. In the article entitled An Interrogation and Response to the Predominant Framing of Truancy author Adriane Kayoko Peralta responds to a truancy report by United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and California Attorney general Kamala Harris. The truancy report by Arne and Duncan claim that parents are to blame for excessive absenteeism in the public school system and parents, students, and schools should be punished. Author Adriane Kayoko Peralta disagrees with the Secretary of Education and the California Attorney General. In her rebuttal article of the report the author provides strong examples of why truancy is an issue, and supports her claims made using ethos, pathos and logos. Peralta asserts that the truancy issue is not quite the crisis it is made out to be and that the truancy is actually a symptom, not the core problem. The author claims that truancy is due to poor economic conditions and racism. The author supports the claim made by Duncan and Harris that truancy is indeed an issue that needs to be addressed. However she does not agree that calling it a crisis is the right way to handle the truancy issue. Peralta insists that framing truancy as a crisis has exacerbated the school to prison pipeline. To begin with, the report exaggerates the truancy problem in its definition of a truant student. (Peralta, 2014). Peralta references the report by Harris and Duncan In the Attorney Generals report, she defines a truant student as a student absent or tardy by more than 20 minutes without a valid excuse on 3 occasions in a school year. The author is using logos to support her claim of truancy being exacerbated, she includes the quote from the report she is arguing as evidence and support. The author believes that defining a student truant based on these specifications is extreme. She further supports this argument by including a statement from the Los Angeles Times Editorial board that states Officials estimate that there are close to one million elementary school students in the state who are truant each year, but that makes the problem sound worse than it is because any student who gets to campus late three times in an academic year is deemed to be truant. A more meaningful measure of the problem is chronic absenteeism, these are the students who miss ten-percent or more school days, or at least eighteen days each academic year. But most schools in the state dont even track how many students are chronically absent. The number that Harris used 250,000 elementary students is extrapolated from a small example. (Peralta, 2014)Peralta goes on to further support her claim by using pathos and creating a descriptive environment for the reader to understand the life of a potential truant student. Poor students often have to rely on public transportation to get to school, public transportation, especially in Los Angeles, can be slow and unpredictable. Moreover, poor families are more likely to greater family responsibilities and work demands that make getting to school on time a challenge. Considering these factors is seems almost reasonable that all students living in urban areas, and especially poor students, will likely be late to school at least three times per school year (Peralta, 2014). Using these persuasive strategies the reader questions how big the truancy issue is and the author is effectively supporting a main claim. Author Adriane Kayoko Peralta asserts that one of the underlying causes of truancy in the United States is that truant students are often minorities that come from poor and underprivileged urban areas and families. The author supports this claim using statistical information stating that In the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the nations second largest school district and Californias largest school district, 88 percent of the students are of color. LAUSDs graduation rate is a measly 56 percent, which means that the dropout rate for LAUSD is 44 percent (Peralta, 2014).

Peralta, A. (2014, July 1). An Interrogation and Response to the predominant Framing of Truancy. Retrieved June 3, 2015, from http://www.uclalawreview.org/pdf/discourse/62-3.pdf