Re: Marion Joseph

[Karen Canty <kvscanty@pacbell.net>]

Since Marion lives in our community and next to one of our schools, I
think I just won't say anything at all....

Karen

-----Original Message-----
From: arn-l-owner@interversity.org [mailto:arn-l-owner@interversity.org]
On Behalf Of George Sheridan
Sent: Wednesday, January 08, 2003 9:38 PM
To: ca-resisters@interversity.org
Cc: arn-l@interversity.org
Subject: [arn-l] Marion Joseph

Marion Joseph has been a key leader, perhaps the key leader, in the 
standards-and-accountability, back-to-basics movement in California.
Peter 
Schrag penned this valedictory to her as she prepares to leave the State

Board of Education. I disagree with his evaluation of the results of her

activism, but he is absolutely right that her impact has been
tremendous.

Peter Schrag: Marion Joseph's decade of education reform
By Peter Schrag -- Bee Columnist
Published Wednesday, January 8, 2003

Ever since 1994, when she first sounded the alarm that millions of 
California schoolchildren weren't learning to read, Marion Joseph has
been 
the state's -- and perhaps the nation's -- most powerful individual
force 
for education reform.

Long before Gov. Pete Wilson named her to the state Board of Education
in 
1997, she drove the state to re-examine its flabby, unproven and 
unsystematic reading instruction and subsequently to more rigorous 
standards in all fields.

Joseph -- a liberal Democrat who once was a chief aide to Wilson Riles, 
former state school superintendent of public instruction -- understood
that 
without rigorous curricula and no-excuses standards, California's
students 
-- the affluent as well as the poor -- would be perpetually behind.

This week, Joseph, now 76, will attend what she says will be her last
board 
meeting. For the record, she quit, although there are a lot of people,
most 
of them on the educational left, who wanted her gone. What's for sure is

that her going has nothing to do with her age, much less her energy,
which 
runs at roughly double the level of people half her years.

It will be an enormous loss because no board member does the work she
does 
or has such a deep knowledge of the links between the academic content
and 
teacher training issues that are at the core of effective schools.

Nor has anyone been so determined to resist pressure from
special-interest 
lobbies, especially the Legislature's Latino caucus, that, in the name
of 
fair treatment, continue to demand "separate, special and segregated 
programs" for large groups of children. The state's standards must be
for 
all students, she believes, not just the privileged.

"All children have to be kept on the main train with all the other 
children," she said, "not put on a side train that goes nowhere."

What makes Joseph's departure particularly worrisome at this time is
that 
pressure to roll back standards will almost certainly increase, partly 
because budget constraints will make it harder to fund the resources 
necessary to allow schools to meet the standards; partly because of the 
inevitable backlash when sanctions for failure begin to kick in; and
partly 
because of sheer fatigue.

Just two weeks ago, there was a new report, funded by teacher unions in
the 
Midwest, purporting to show that so-called high-stakes testing did not
lead 
to any improvement in student performance, and that states such as 
California, which have what the report called high-stakes tests, gained 
less in reading and math than the national average.

The report, produced by researchers at the Education Policy Research
Unit 
at Arizona State University (ASU), is riddled with dubious conclusions
and 
murky definitions, but since it made the front page of the New York
Times, 
it will no doubt have an impact far beyond its merit.

In this state, the California Teachers Association, which has been 
vigorously resisting the state's testing program, and which last year 
fought to make all local curricular policy subject to collective 
bargaining, circulated the testing report far and wide.

With the additional accountability demands -- and the confusion --
imposed 
by President Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education act, the
backlash 
against rigorous requirements will almost certainly increase. If states
all 
have to show progress toward meeting their own standards, as NCLB
requires, 
pressure to lower those standards will mount with it.

California's testing program, and particularly the high-school exit
exam, 
began with well-documented flaws. Because of the flaws, the effective
date 
of the exit exam, now 2004, when seniors who fail the test will be
denied 
diplomas, will almost certainly be set back at least a year and more
likely 
two years. To do anything else will make the state vulnerable to
lawsuits 
that it probably can't win.

The danger is that it will be watered down or deferred forever. That
would 
be a disaster because the impending pressure of the exit exam, as Joseph

says, is doing more to "make the schools sit up and take notice" than
any 
other lever the state has.

That's particularly true for poor African-American and Latino students 
whose dismal performance was often neglected or excused as an inevitable

consequence of economic and cultural handicaps.

Once state accountability systems, notwithstanding all their flaws, 
required schools to show progress among all major subgroups, and not
just 
school-wide averages, it was no longer possible to ignore black and
Latino 
students.

Audrey Amrein, the co-author of the ASU report on high-stakes testing, 
denies that teachers would ignore those students. But there's no
question 
that the system, which assigns the least-qualified teachers to the
neediest 
schools, did write them off -- and often still does.

Joseph will stay engaged, perhaps even as a board consultant, and her 
influence will still be felt. Even before she joined the board, she
showed 
how much difference one individual can make. But her departure will
still 
leave a hole that no one can fill.

About the Writer: Peter Schrag can be reached at Box 15779, Sacramento,
CA 
95852-0779 or at pschrag@sacbee.com.

George Sheridan-------------------------------------------------------
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