In his State of the Union Address, President Bush asked Congress to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, which was signed into law in January 2002. One of the main goals of NCLB is to close the achievement gap between black and white students by 2014. In his speech Mr. Bush claimed that “students are performing better in reading and math and minority students are closing the achievement gap,” and he called upon congress to “build on this success.” Test scores have indeed improved in some subject areas. But NCLB has certainly not been widely successful. It will take more than just school reform to close an achievement gap that has existed for decades and is rooted, not just in poorly funded schools, but in larger social issues as well.
According to the latest data available from the National Assessment of Education Progress the biggest improvement has been in fourth grade math scores. In 2005 blacks showed a 7-point gain over their average score from 2000, and the black-white gap decreased by five points in that same time period. Eighth grade math scores for blacks also rose during the same time period, and the gap decreased by six points. However, reading scores have remained stagnant. The black-white gap in fourth grade reading scores has shrunk by only one point since NCLB’s passage in 2002. Eighth grade reading scores show the worst results. Since 2002 scores for blacks actually fell, while white reading scores virtually flat-lined and the gap has widened by a point. The slight overall gain in math scores since 2002 may be due to changes in schooling implemented by NCLB. But the stagnant reading scores are reason to believe that NCLB, with all its good intentions, will not close the gap.
NCLB’s greatest failure is that it aims to close the black-white test score gap without addressing the causal factors of that gap.
In 1994, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s controversial and inflammatory book, The Bell Curve, sparked a heated debate as scholars sought to debunk the book’s claim that the achievement gap is largely genetically heritable and differences in IQ amongst the races cannot be chalked up to environmental causes. The debate generated a body of research by sociologists, best documented in The Black-White Test Score Gap, an extensive volume published in 1998 and edited by Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips. The works published in this volume, as well as more recent studies, have found two major factors that cause and perpetuate the gap: socioeconomic status (SES) and environmental factors, which include home environment, family life and parenting practices. There is also the complicated issue of inequality, which is intricately wrapped up in all these factors.
NCLB does not confront the disparities of socioeconomic status. In and of itself NCLB cannot erase the effects of SES. While it attempts to hold schools that provide education for low SES children to the same standards as schools in wealthy neighborhoods, it cannot change the distinctive environmental differences and disadvantages experienced by children reared in low SES families and neighborhoods. Disparities in SES are tangible and obvious. With low SES comes the greater likelihood of unsafe neighborhoods, under-funded schools, lack of access to healthcare and fewer educational resources, to name just a few.
Mr. Bush listed among NCLB’s virtues that it gives parents of children who attend failing schools “the right to choose something better.” If Mr. Bush really wanted to give these parents a better choice he would have called for hikes in the minimum wage and a comprehensive health care coverage for those who need it most, both of which would significantly affect families of low SES.
The black-white test score gap is a problem that is not primarily conceived in our schools. It is conceived in our stratified social structure that perpetuates disparities in SES and leaves children to compete on a wildly unequal playing field for the education they deserve. NCLB, a policy that focuses accountability and reform solely on schools, is aimed at the wrong target and will not close the gap by 2014 in its current incarnation.
1.18.2007
An excerpt from my paper on Simone de Beauvoir
“An attachment only develops any true strength if it has to assert itself against something.”
-Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, 1962.
Introduction
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre’s relationship spanned a fifty-year period from when they met in 1929 until his death in 1980. There has been much speculation about the infamous literary couple. History has cast a lascivious shadow scandal across the story of their lives. I seek to explore the events of Beauvoir’s life, her writing, and her relationship with Sartre in an effort to explain and understand this infamous couple, and in particular, Beauvoir’s motivations for pursuing and honoring the liaison.
The meeting of these two extraordinary minds produced a unique and eccentric relationship that must be understood within its historical and intellectual contexts. The two lived by an existentialist philosophy that called for them to embrace all the experiences of their lives, both happiness and pain, as individuals in an uncertain world. While the relationship between Beauvoir and Sartre was characterized by a ubiquitous sense of uncertainty, it was also blanketed with the knowledge that they would always share a private intellectual world. Their relationship was a great source of pain and anxiety for Beauvoir but it was also the root from which most of her philosophical and literary ideas sprung. Had she chosen an easier and more conventional path she would not have experienced the challenge, pleasure, and pain that characterized her relationship with Sartre and she may never have produced the body of literature that proved so influential and relevant.
Growing Up
Simone Lucie-Ernestine-Marie-Bertrand de Beauvoir was born January 9, 1908, in Paris, which would always remain her home. Her father, Georges Bertand de Beauvoir, came from southwestern France and his lineage was of minor nobility. Her father was a lawyer, but not a very good one. His charm far outweighed his talents. Her mother, Françoise, also came from a well-to-do Catholic family but her roots were in northwestern France. Françoise and Georges bore only one other child, Hélène de Beauvoir, on June 9, 1910; she was quickly given the nickname Poupette. Simone and Poupette were very close during their childhood and spent long hours playing in the apartment on the corner of Boulevard Raspail and Boulevard du Montparnasse. Georges and Françoise were surely disappointed at having a second daughter in lieu of a son; Simone was praised and coddled while Hélène’s achievements often lay in the shadow of her elder sister’s.
The First World War eroded much of the family’s ability to keep up its bourgeois lifestyle. They stretched their resources yet always made a great effort at maintaining their social status despite their financial woes. In the summer of 1919 the family moved to a fifth floor apartment on the Rue de Rennes in a middle-class neighborhood. Georges, after suffering two heart attacks by the age of forty, did not return to the practice of law following the War. He stayed in the newspaper business, which he had entered during the War, and held minor positions in the financial pages or worked as an advertising salesman. He was often quickly let go from his post when his superiors realized that his charm far exceeded his talents as a journalist; he was never financially successful in the newspaper business. Georges was deeply ashamed of his failures and the plummeting social standing of his family.
Simone graduated from Cours Désir, a Catholic girls school, in 1924 at the age of sixteen. Because of the family’s financial situation Georges believed that his daughters would never marry because he would be unable to provide a dowry for them. Simone’s parents supported her education because she would have to work in order to support herself. Françoise and Georges urged her to become a librarian or teach in a well-regarded Catholic school, such as the one she had attended, but Simone wanted to teach philosophy in the public school system. She would need to attend secondary school before she would be able to take the university exams, the next step towards the teaching certificate she would need. Eventually Françoise relented and Simone enrolled in the Institut Sainte-Marie where she studied literature and language. Françoise had always maintained a strict and domineering moral code for her daughters, similar to her own Catholic upbringing. Françoise remained deeply involved in Simone’s life as she came of age. During Simone’s years at Institut Sainte-Marie she began to foster an intensely secretive attitude in order to thwart her mother’s domineering gaze, which she heavily resented. Simone received excellent marks at Institut Sainte-Marie and went on to study philosophy at the Sorbonne.
First Meeting
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was born on June 21, 1905, in Paris. His father, Jean Babtiste Sartre, was a French naval officer who died when Jean-Paul was only fifteen months old. Following her husband’s death, his mother, Anne-Marie Schweitzer, moved back to her parents’ home and raised Jean-Paul with their help. Anne-Marie’s father, Charles Schweitzer, a Professor of German language at the Sorbonne, introduced Sartre to literature and mathematics at an early age. Sartre later wrote in his memoirs of the fantastic effect of his grandfather’s influence: “I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book.” Sartre’s upbringing was a privileged one. His grandparents doted on him and Anne-Marie forged a very close relationship with her young son during these years; the two even lived in the same room. In 1917 Anne-Marie married Joseph Mancy, a naval engineer, and the trio moved to the rural town of La Rouchelle. Both the move and the marriage dealt a serious blow to Sartre, who was never able to reconcile his detest for Mancy.
Sartre attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and went on to study at the elite Ècole Normale Supérieure, where, while he was studying for the agrégation in 1929, he met Simone de Beauvoir. He was twenty-four years old and stood five foot one; he wore thick glasses and clothes that did not suit his body. His skin was dull and pockmarked; clearly his attentions were wholly focused on his interior world of thought and inquiry and he cared little for his personal appearance. He was sharp, witty, funny and very generous. Beauvoir was just twenty-one years old, not a stunning beauty, but she was robust and attractive and had a commanding presence.
Initially Beauvoir took little notice of Sartre. She had become infatuated with Sartre’s married friend, René Maheu, and it was Maheu who first introduced the two. He invited Beauvoir to join a study group for the oral portion of the agrégation with himself, Sartre, and Paul Nazan. It was this group that on their very first day of study gave Beauvoir the nickname Le Castor, The Beaver, which was used affectionately for the rest of her life by many of her friends and lovers.
In July of 1929 the results for the written agrégation were posted and twenty-six candidates were successful, including Beauvoir and Sartre. But Maheu was not so lucky as he did not pass the exam. Maheu left Paris on the very same day that the exam results were posted. With Maheu out of the picture Sartre stepped up to Beauvoir’s side and barely left it during the two weeks that they were given to prepare for the highly competitive oral portion of the agrégation. They studied day and night and the results were posted soon after the exam on July 30th. Jean-Paul Sartre took first place with Simone de Beauvoir following just two points behind, in second place. At twenty-one Beauvoir was the youngest person ever to pass the exam and was among only eight women in all of France with an agrégation in philosophy.
There is some speculation that Beauvoir exhibited equal if not superior knowledge on the exam and that first prize should have been awarded her but went to Sartre for several reasons. Sartre, who had already been studying philosophy for seven years, was taking the exams for the second time, having failed them the previous June. Beauvoir was taking a double load as she prepared for her teacher’s diploma while simultaneously studying for the agrégation in order to shorten her education by a year. In light of these facts, the two-point differential seems arbitrary. Sartre had suffered much during his adolescence; his schoolmates had often shunned him because of his awkward manner and his thick glasses. But he never had to struggle for access to education and his intellect was fostered and nurtured by his family as he grew up. Beauvoir had fought against not only her parents but also the social barriers that stood in her way.
While this point marked the beginning of Sartre’s influence on Beauvoir, she had declared her lofty intellectual goals and established her position as a groundbreaking individualist long before she met Sartre. She had chosen the life of an intellectual and waged an uphill battle against her parents’ and societal expectations of women of her class in order to obtain her goals. Beauvoir lived in a world that sharply divided the sexes. In Paris at the time women were expected to marry and to remain virgins until marriage. They could not go into bars or cafés and did not drink or smoke in public. With Sartre at her side she proceeded to break all these rules.
-Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, 1962.
Introduction
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre’s relationship spanned a fifty-year period from when they met in 1929 until his death in 1980. There has been much speculation about the infamous literary couple. History has cast a lascivious shadow scandal across the story of their lives. I seek to explore the events of Beauvoir’s life, her writing, and her relationship with Sartre in an effort to explain and understand this infamous couple, and in particular, Beauvoir’s motivations for pursuing and honoring the liaison.
The meeting of these two extraordinary minds produced a unique and eccentric relationship that must be understood within its historical and intellectual contexts. The two lived by an existentialist philosophy that called for them to embrace all the experiences of their lives, both happiness and pain, as individuals in an uncertain world. While the relationship between Beauvoir and Sartre was characterized by a ubiquitous sense of uncertainty, it was also blanketed with the knowledge that they would always share a private intellectual world. Their relationship was a great source of pain and anxiety for Beauvoir but it was also the root from which most of her philosophical and literary ideas sprung. Had she chosen an easier and more conventional path she would not have experienced the challenge, pleasure, and pain that characterized her relationship with Sartre and she may never have produced the body of literature that proved so influential and relevant.
Growing Up
Simone Lucie-Ernestine-Marie-Bertrand de Beauvoir was born January 9, 1908, in Paris, which would always remain her home. Her father, Georges Bertand de Beauvoir, came from southwestern France and his lineage was of minor nobility. Her father was a lawyer, but not a very good one. His charm far outweighed his talents. Her mother, Françoise, also came from a well-to-do Catholic family but her roots were in northwestern France. Françoise and Georges bore only one other child, Hélène de Beauvoir, on June 9, 1910; she was quickly given the nickname Poupette. Simone and Poupette were very close during their childhood and spent long hours playing in the apartment on the corner of Boulevard Raspail and Boulevard du Montparnasse. Georges and Françoise were surely disappointed at having a second daughter in lieu of a son; Simone was praised and coddled while Hélène’s achievements often lay in the shadow of her elder sister’s.
The First World War eroded much of the family’s ability to keep up its bourgeois lifestyle. They stretched their resources yet always made a great effort at maintaining their social status despite their financial woes. In the summer of 1919 the family moved to a fifth floor apartment on the Rue de Rennes in a middle-class neighborhood. Georges, after suffering two heart attacks by the age of forty, did not return to the practice of law following the War. He stayed in the newspaper business, which he had entered during the War, and held minor positions in the financial pages or worked as an advertising salesman. He was often quickly let go from his post when his superiors realized that his charm far exceeded his talents as a journalist; he was never financially successful in the newspaper business. Georges was deeply ashamed of his failures and the plummeting social standing of his family.
Simone graduated from Cours Désir, a Catholic girls school, in 1924 at the age of sixteen. Because of the family’s financial situation Georges believed that his daughters would never marry because he would be unable to provide a dowry for them. Simone’s parents supported her education because she would have to work in order to support herself. Françoise and Georges urged her to become a librarian or teach in a well-regarded Catholic school, such as the one she had attended, but Simone wanted to teach philosophy in the public school system. She would need to attend secondary school before she would be able to take the university exams, the next step towards the teaching certificate she would need. Eventually Françoise relented and Simone enrolled in the Institut Sainte-Marie where she studied literature and language. Françoise had always maintained a strict and domineering moral code for her daughters, similar to her own Catholic upbringing. Françoise remained deeply involved in Simone’s life as she came of age. During Simone’s years at Institut Sainte-Marie she began to foster an intensely secretive attitude in order to thwart her mother’s domineering gaze, which she heavily resented. Simone received excellent marks at Institut Sainte-Marie and went on to study philosophy at the Sorbonne.
First Meeting
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was born on June 21, 1905, in Paris. His father, Jean Babtiste Sartre, was a French naval officer who died when Jean-Paul was only fifteen months old. Following her husband’s death, his mother, Anne-Marie Schweitzer, moved back to her parents’ home and raised Jean-Paul with their help. Anne-Marie’s father, Charles Schweitzer, a Professor of German language at the Sorbonne, introduced Sartre to literature and mathematics at an early age. Sartre later wrote in his memoirs of the fantastic effect of his grandfather’s influence: “I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book.” Sartre’s upbringing was a privileged one. His grandparents doted on him and Anne-Marie forged a very close relationship with her young son during these years; the two even lived in the same room. In 1917 Anne-Marie married Joseph Mancy, a naval engineer, and the trio moved to the rural town of La Rouchelle. Both the move and the marriage dealt a serious blow to Sartre, who was never able to reconcile his detest for Mancy.
Sartre attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and went on to study at the elite Ècole Normale Supérieure, where, while he was studying for the agrégation in 1929, he met Simone de Beauvoir. He was twenty-four years old and stood five foot one; he wore thick glasses and clothes that did not suit his body. His skin was dull and pockmarked; clearly his attentions were wholly focused on his interior world of thought and inquiry and he cared little for his personal appearance. He was sharp, witty, funny and very generous. Beauvoir was just twenty-one years old, not a stunning beauty, but she was robust and attractive and had a commanding presence.
Initially Beauvoir took little notice of Sartre. She had become infatuated with Sartre’s married friend, René Maheu, and it was Maheu who first introduced the two. He invited Beauvoir to join a study group for the oral portion of the agrégation with himself, Sartre, and Paul Nazan. It was this group that on their very first day of study gave Beauvoir the nickname Le Castor, The Beaver, which was used affectionately for the rest of her life by many of her friends and lovers.
In July of 1929 the results for the written agrégation were posted and twenty-six candidates were successful, including Beauvoir and Sartre. But Maheu was not so lucky as he did not pass the exam. Maheu left Paris on the very same day that the exam results were posted. With Maheu out of the picture Sartre stepped up to Beauvoir’s side and barely left it during the two weeks that they were given to prepare for the highly competitive oral portion of the agrégation. They studied day and night and the results were posted soon after the exam on July 30th. Jean-Paul Sartre took first place with Simone de Beauvoir following just two points behind, in second place. At twenty-one Beauvoir was the youngest person ever to pass the exam and was among only eight women in all of France with an agrégation in philosophy.
There is some speculation that Beauvoir exhibited equal if not superior knowledge on the exam and that first prize should have been awarded her but went to Sartre for several reasons. Sartre, who had already been studying philosophy for seven years, was taking the exams for the second time, having failed them the previous June. Beauvoir was taking a double load as she prepared for her teacher’s diploma while simultaneously studying for the agrégation in order to shorten her education by a year. In light of these facts, the two-point differential seems arbitrary. Sartre had suffered much during his adolescence; his schoolmates had often shunned him because of his awkward manner and his thick glasses. But he never had to struggle for access to education and his intellect was fostered and nurtured by his family as he grew up. Beauvoir had fought against not only her parents but also the social barriers that stood in her way.
While this point marked the beginning of Sartre’s influence on Beauvoir, she had declared her lofty intellectual goals and established her position as a groundbreaking individualist long before she met Sartre. She had chosen the life of an intellectual and waged an uphill battle against her parents’ and societal expectations of women of her class in order to obtain her goals. Beauvoir lived in a world that sharply divided the sexes. In Paris at the time women were expected to marry and to remain virgins until marriage. They could not go into bars or cafés and did not drink or smoke in public. With Sartre at her side she proceeded to break all these rules.
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