Let's see, first I saw the email about the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation 2005 Prizes for Excellence in Education, which reads in part:
After careful consideration of the nominees gathered through public solicitation, the Foundation's selection committee recommended -- and the trustees approved -- the 2005 Prize winners:
For Valor
John E. Brandl, former Democratic member of the Minnesota House of Representatives and Senate and professor at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota; and
Marion Joseph, former member of the California State Board of Education (1997-2003) and assistant to California's state superintendent of public instruction from 1970-1982.
Ms. Joseph's name didn't immediately ring a bell (I plead temporary overworkedness), so I didn't think much about this, until I received the following email from math guru Mike McKeown:
Marion Joseph was, finally, awarded a much deserved Fordham Foundation Valor Prize. She should have been one of the first.
Marion is a hero of education. All the good things that have happened in California education in the last 10 years would not have happened without Marion. She got started the same way most of us parent/grandparent activists did: They (school curriculum experts and educrats) were mistreating our children and no one seemed to care. Her successes were not just in reading (phonics). She made the math and science standards and intelligent curricula happen. She worked across the political spectrum to find those who understood what worked and was good for kids and to choose that over comfort inducing but failing programs and ideas.
Wow, I figured, that sounds pretty spiffy. But a second email from Mike really perked up my ears, as I discovered that infamous touchy-feely blogger and testing opponent Susan Ohanian is steaming over Ms. Joseph's prize:
Oh my goodness.
By valor Fordham must mean that Marion Joseph successfully kept any staff development provider with a curriculum view different from hers out of California. Twenty-seven of us from around the country, published authors regarded as experts in our fields, filled out the 17-page form requesting to get on the list "approved" by the California State Board of Education when Joseph was the chief judge. We came from a variety of pedagogical perspectives and we all received identical form rejection letters. One of the items disqualifying us was "inadequate overhead transparencies."
Yes, the applicant had to indicate every word that would be uttered to teachers and include copies of any and all reading materials, overhead transparencies, recommended books. It provided a preview of the rigid structures soon to be imposed on California schools.
What exactly is Ms. Ohanian an expert on, other than writing books about how public schools should hate and fear the marketplace, with all its concerned parents and "rightest" think tanks? It's very telling that she considers a teaching plan to be something to be managed so loosely that the Board of Education need not be provided with evidence of what the teacher actually intends to say in the classroom. How dare Ms. Joseph insist that she actually know something about a plan she is to approve! (And how interesting that Ms. Ohanian doesn't enlighten us on the other reasons she and her friends were turned down.)
I, for one, find Ms. Joseph's attention to detail encouraging:
I retired (from the State Department of Education) in 1982 and went off to do other things. And in 1987 California adopted a new language arts framework which attempted to raise the level of the kind of materials children read to a high level of literature. But what it did in actuality was minimize the idea that there were any foundation skills like phonics or spelling necessary for learning to read. And in fact, when the books were adopted by the state, those skills were not included in the books.
In 1991 my daughter asked me to go see my grandson's open house at his school and I went. This was the first year of what I came to know later as whole language. I'd never heard those words. I heard this young teacher describe this program and I couldn't really understand what she was talking about. The teacher showed us what they used to teach reading, and it was a beautiful anthology of stories, but in no way did it have anything to do with teaching a child to read. And my daughter said, "Well, my son can't read those words. Can all the children read those words?" And the teacher said, "Well, some can and some can't." And my daughter said, "Well, I'd like the books that you use to teach the children to read the words, then I can help my son at home." The teacher shrugged, and I realized then that this was all she had...
So California took a huge nosedive. And we began to go to work on it. But it takes a while to dig your way out of that. You have to write new textbooks and teach the teachers this different method. It takes a long time.
My guess is that Joseph's attention to little details - like the insufficient reading texts and the rock-bottom NAEP scores - are the bees in the bonnet of Ms. Ohanian and others of her ilk. Like Monty Neill, who probably figured he was safe slamming Ms. Joseph on the anti-testing ARN-L newgroup - and got a few of his nasty comments handed back to him, before the thread devolved into Bush-bashing, test-bashing, and nitpicking over whether Ms. Joseph can even be called an "educator".
Posted by kswygert at December 3, 2004 02:06 PM