Pinkerton, a writer for Newsday and contributor to Fox News, writes "A Grand Compromise" in The Atlantic Monthly to address issues of education. Pinkerton examines statistics of money versus education. He proposes that national governments be more responsible for public education and that schools are allotted more money. He expresses his concern for an essential education and understands that schools with more money consistently have students whom test higher. Pinkerton wants to give students the right to choose a public school (not based on district) so that the fundamentally worse schools may be easily spotted by their lack of attendance, achieving this through the Pell Grant program. He is concerned with pleasing both liberals and conservatives. Pinkerton's article is based mainly on his presentation of facts. He arranges his information in an organizational manner so that it greatly appeals to the logic of the reader. He incorporates parenthesis to clarify facts and present new ideas. And uses rhetorical question to provoke thought and encourage further opinions. Many rhetorical devices are used in "A Grand Compromise"; the three that most enhance the opinion of the author are logos, parenthesis, and rhetorical question. .
The combination of logos, parenthesis and rhetorical question allow the author to present facts, add his own ideas, and then encourage the reader to form opinions on the same matter. Logos is used frequently in "A Grand Compromise." The article presents many statistics on financial support of education, where money comes from and a graph of the relationship between money and test scores. For example, Pinkerton states, "the Program for International Student Assessment found that American fifteen-year olds ranked fourteenth in science literacy and eighteenth in math literacy amount the thirty-two countries administering the test, scoring below average" (115).
