Najat Vallaud-Belkacem Quotes
Equality in education is my number one battle.
As hard as it is for us to imagine today, while her husband was President of the United States, the First Lady wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column every single day with politics frequently the subject. While she usually agreed with the President, there were occasions where they seemed to not see things exactly the same. She tended to be more liberal than he. However, there were those who believed that when she criticized politicians, it was with FDR’s knowledge and blessing and she sometimes did his “dirty work.” Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the most influential people in the country—certainly more-so than any First Lady before and since.
The organization was initially called the National Negro Committee. The following year the name was changed to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Note that at the time, even for Blacks, the concept of desegregation was so far from reality that their efforts were simply to have segregated schools with the same resources as the white children had. The “separate but equal” doctrine was the method of the segregationists.
Black and Hispanic student performance on educational achievement tests were much lower than that of whites. There were many who believed that this gap was responsible for most of the other ethnic differences that made for ethnic and racial inequality. Ironically, it was Romney’s party in Congress that opposed more funding for education and generally was opposed to federal efforts to improve and monitor civil rights. However, Romney was talking to a mostly Hispanic audience and took a position that was seemingly contradictory to his Party’s Platform and the actions of the then Republican Controlled House of Representatives.
Najat Vallaud-Belkacem is a former French jurist and politician of the Socialist Party (PS) who was the first French woman to serve as Minister of Education, Higher Education, and Research in the governments of successive Prime Ministers Manuel Valls and Bernard Cazeneuve from 2014 until 2017. Since 2020, she has been the director of the One Campaign in France.
