Local Editorial Analysis – The Daily Advertiser (Lafayette, LA)

Budgeting has always been a problem with Louisiana’s state government. Even now after my departure from the state it seems that the problem has not been solved. In this piece from The Daily Advertiser, there is an explicit emphasis put on the importance of early education and the lack of funding it has.

The main policy claim in the article is that Louisiana government needs to help make early education accessible and affordable. The article features several key points of factual information to back up the policy claim of the article as well. In the piece, the following data is shown to help emphasize the importance of the policy claim:

“Currently, 94 percent of 4-year-old children in need have access to quality early learning, yet fewer than 7 percent of in-need children birth to age 2 and fewer than 33 percent of in-need 3-year-old children do.”

– The Daily Advertiser

Louisiana has never been top of the charts for quality education. In fact, they are usually near the bottom of the list, ranking 48 out of 51 in education, and 50 of 51 in nearly every other statistic. Using this knowledge, the article claims the way to change these abysmal statistics would be to make early education easier to access and much cheaper than it already is. The article uses both personal experiences and logical appeals to fuel the claims made.

The article itself uses plenty of factual statistics to back up its claims and to help push the narrative that early education is essential to Louisianans. The report has several points about how Louisiana is actively losing money and misplacing the money spent on education (no surprise).

The ending of the article is more of a call to action for Louisianans to be prepared and educated on the matter so they too can fight for more affordable education for their children. With the amount of money spent on education already in the state, some serious work would have to be accomplished by the people to motivate lawmakers to do something. I would not doubt if the writer knew this, since the appeal is mainly towards the citizens and less towards the lawmakers.

Overall the article presents some solid claims and backs them up with valid and legitimate evidence that helps their narrative without focusing on anything outside of the main idea. I would argue that it was effective in its objective and did a very effective job accomplishing its goal of making the public aware of its concern.