The following dissertation considers the relationships of rhetorical arguments and quantifications, particularly how quantification has become a rhetorical trope in educational research and writing. This dissertation seeks to contribute to how generalist texts argue to general audiences about the conditions and recommended changes in education through inclusion of and reliance upon quantified data. This dissertation looks at three generalist texts as objects of study to consider the rhetorical deployments of quantification. These texts are: Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom's No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, and Tony Wagner's The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need--And What We Can Do About It. This dissertation begins with an experience that I had during the beginning semester of my graduate education in the Department of Teacher Education after changing from the Department of Statistics and Probability, both at Michigan State University. The introduction considers some of the influences in my personal journey and also influences in shaping this dissertation, including the National Research Council's text Scientific Research in Education. From this experience, the dissertation considers the language of quantification and the roles of quantification in changing how research is done in different areas; quantification has become common as accepted evidence in argumentation. This dissertation considers this proliferated acceptance as a potential space for quantitative illiteracies and shortcomings, with a potential to misuse the quantified data in making educational arguments. The dissertation, written for an introductory educational quantitative research course, considers conditions of education through the lens of goal steering, particularly how predetermined educational outcomes are steering the curriculum, the teaching, and the learning. The dissertation considers the influence of the business concept of auditing and how the current educational trend is focused by an audit culture. The auditing of educational practice and performance and the goal steering associated with it come through measurements, particularly through standardized test data, and the applications of quantifications. The dissertation provides two case-study chapters based on the three objects of study listed in the opening of this abstract. The first of these two chapters (Chapter Three) focuses on the rhetorical use of quantification to make predictions and to generalize. The second case-study chapter (Chapter Four) considers three rhetorical deployments of descriptive quantification in educational texts: the rhetoric of comparison, the rhetoric of transparency, and the rhetoric of the jeremiad. The second to last chapter explores some of the assumptions associated with quantification, hoping to examine more the theoretical conditions that have led to a strong rhetorical presence of quantification in generalist educational arguments. This chapter considers how the rhetorical influences of quantification have been impacted by positivist notions: including the assumptions that it is possible to convert quality into quantity, through a discussion about qualia; the assumptions that qualities apply beyond the sample; the notion that the future will be like the past, i.e. that history cycles; the conflation of probability as a certainty; the views that humans can be studied like the natural world; and problems with predicting and forecasting. I conclude the dissertation with a question of what types of evidence are required for what types of educational reforms. I offer a sibling type of evidence that might be used in educational argumentation. This chapter asks the question posited by Dutch educationalist Gert Biesta "Are we measuring what we value or valuing what we can measure?"
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