Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-1994

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Communication

Major Professor

Paul Ashdown

Committee Members

Ed Caudill, James Crook, Barbara Moore, Linda Bensel-Myers

Abstract

This study examines a group of public education narritives published from 1967 until 1991. Relying on an appeal to fairness, these texts documented and exposed the inequities in the distribution of educational resources, especially within the inner city. Using a variety of literary and investigative techniques, the authors supplied their own moral vision and ethos to create a journalism of outrage. This study analyzed rhetorically nine select books from the period written by seven different authors with Jonathan Kozol as prototype. The authors used narratives to transform the acts, actors, and events "inside the classroom; the analysis employed Kenneth Burke's dramatistic methodology to deconstruct the narratives. In addition, the research explored ways in which a reader-writer contract was formed. This contract heightened public awareness of the continued inequities in public education despite the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education which implied equal treatment of all public school children. The study found that while the authors failed to evoke significant change, they did gain widespread critical response. They also achieved a rhetorical and journalistic significance beyond reform because they documented the conditions of and spoke prophetically about public education thereby raising fundamental societal value questions in readers' minds. This study concluded that while universal reform of public school education has not occurred, a journalism of outrage is both significant and successful as a rhetoric.

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