‘Middlemarch': The Power of Acceptance
The Face Behind 'George Eliot'
Mary Ann Evans (1819
–
1880) was born on the Arbury Hall estate in Warwickshire county, England. Her father managed the estate, and Evans could easily access its many resources, including books and libraries. She became a voracious reader. Her quick ability to learn convinced the Evans family to invest in an education available to few women at the time. Although her formal schooling stopped when she turned 16, Evans continued studying on her own, gaining a broad knowledge of the Western literary canon. She fell in love with Ancient Greek drama and later used its themes as inspiration for her writing.
After a short but successful career in journalistic writing, Evans took to fiction. That's when she decided to adopt the nom de plume, 'George Eliot.' Female authors were often published under their own names, as she had been. In fiction, however, the stereotype was as Evans described it in '
': Women could only write vain and shallow plots for lighthearted romances. She thought this stereotype unfair, but she also criticized her female peers for giving into it. Evans wanted to offer a better and deeper kind of literature. The pen name was a first step.
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These factors make it difficult to make accurate conclusions on what the ACGR says about education in each state, Lubienski told Newsweek. Broadly, factors that cause variation in education outcomes in states include "family incomes," Murnane said, pointing to Massachusetts as "a quite wealthy state." He also said that high school graduation rates depend on the percentage of students who are immigrants. "Many immigrants come with low English skills and have trouble doing high-school-level work. Others move back to their original countries before they graduate," Murnane said. He added that "when and where the economy is very strong, drop out rates tend to be higher because students leave school to take jobs." What People Are Saying Christopher Lubienski, director of the Center for Evaluation & Education Policy at Indiana University and elected member of the National Academy of Education, told Newsweek: "A more useful number would be looking at this issue over time. Assuming that a given state has maintained its same graduation requirement, changes over time would give us some indication as to whether schools are performing better or worse." He added: "Students are more likely to successfully complete school if they attend a well-resourced school, and have suitable family, community and school support systems in place." Richard Murnane, a professor of education and society at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told Newsweek: "States differ in how well they track high school graduation rates. The data comes from individual high schools. High schools have incentives to state that students who leave prior to graduation have 'transferred' to another school rather than state they have 'dropped out.' Some states check on the accuracy of the reports from individual schools much more carefully than other states do." Mavis Sanders, a senior research scholar of Black Children and Families at Child Trends, nonprofit, non-partisan research organization, told Newsweek: "Graduation rates are complex outcomes shaped by a variety of factors, including the availability of jobs and career opportunities for individuals without high school diplomas, graduation requirements which differ by state, as well as specific supports and pathways to graduation—such as those implemented in states like Tennessee." She added: "Graduation rates also vary significantly across student groups and are influenced by factors such as socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity, and English language proficiency. As such, graduation rates reflect broader issues of educational access and opportunity."
