GRE ARGUMENT Topic 31
The following appeared in a letter to the editor of Parson City’s local newspaper.
“In our region of Trillura, the majority of money spent on the schools that most students attend—the city-run public schools—comes from taxes that each city government collects. The region’s cities differ, however, in the budgetary priority they give to public education. For example, both as a proportion of its overall tax revenues and in absolute terms, Parson City has recently spent almost twice as much per year as Blue City has for its public schools—even though both cities have about the same number of residents. Clearly, Parson City residents place a higher value on providing a good education in public schools than Blue City residents do.”
Write a response in which you discuss what specific evidence is needed to evaluate the argument and explain how the evidence would weaken or strengthen the argument.
In the argument, the author concludes that Parson City have a higher value with respect on a good education in public schools than Blue City residents based on several assumptions. However, these all do not constitute a logical argument in favor of its conclusion and fail to provide convincing evidence making the argument sound and invulnerable.
In the first place, the author claims that Parson residents own a higher value compare to the residents in Blue City due to the total budget they spent on public school. But it has no casual relationship between these two events. For example, Parson City may have a poor infrastructure and quality of teachers, so they need to spend more money on it to ameliorate this situation. Moreover, private schools have recently been growing and attract many local students, the local government feel obliged to spend more on public education to recover their prosperity of student source to earn more profits. Without providing the evidence to rule out these possibilities, the author cannot justifiably conclude that more money spent on the public school would result in the higher attitude of residents to public school.
In the second place, the arguer makes a comparation between Parson City and Blue City thus he/she makes conclusion. However, he/she does not provide any evidence to prove the similarities and differences between the two cities. For instance, Parson City may have more public schools than Blue City, which requires more money to investigate even thought they have same number of residents. Furthermore, Parson City will hold an anniversary of all public schools in the region of Trillura, so they need more money to prepare this huge activity. Finally, the residents in Blue City are consisted of aged people who do not have kids to go to school. Therefore, there is no need to provide a lot of money on public education. Lacking of evidence to illustrate the similarities and differences between those two cities, the author would not make such conclusion.
In the final place, although the information the author provides are facts, s/he still cannot get the conclusion that the high number on budget means good attitude to public school on the ground that he/she fails to provide the number of students who go to public schools in two cities. If the number of students who go to public school in Parson is far more than Blue City, that would possible explain the reason why they spend more money on public school. If the author does not provide cogent evidence to take account of the difference of student number who attend to public school, he/she cannot draw such conclusion.
To sum up, the arguer fails to substantiate his/her claim that the value of Parson City residents towards good educations in public school is no lower than Blue City because the evidence cited do not lend a strong support to what the arguer maintains. In order to make the conclusion more convincing, the author would have to provide more evidence with regard to the casual link between the total amount of tax revenue and the attitude of residents to education.
