“They found it very damaging — Jewish kids lined up on one side, Catholics on another side. It served to set them apart and make them victims,” said Joseph, a longtime Bay Area resident who was appointed to the California Board of Education in August.
“I have heard, in these many long years, much about what prayer in school and mixing up religion in school meant to them.”
Joseph, who moved to Menlo Park three years ago after living in Novato since 1970, considers her stand against religious expression in public schools a no-brainer.
“I am a devout believer in church-state separation. That is a fundamental principle to me,” the 70-year-old said.
“I think public school administrators and teachers have an enormous job. I think getting mixed up in things that aren’t their main job is really just diversionary.”
Joseph, in fact, doesn’t want to spend her time on the state board focusing on the “sideline issues” that she opposes, such as school prayer or taxpayer-supported vouchers for private school tuition.
She wants instead to beef up the teaching of old-fashioned basics — specifically reading — in the state’s elementary, middle and high schools.
“I think the schools have had serious problems. That is why my commitment is to making schools work.”
Joseph has been involved in education and education politics for nearly four decades. It started in the early 1960s when she helped run a campaign for a state schools superintendent. In 1970, she started working in the Department of Education.
When she retired 12 years later, she was a top aide to Wilson Riles, then state superintendent of schools.
Joseph became a grassroots activist for education in the late 1980s when her grandchild Isaac entered elementary school and was having problems learning to read.
She discovered that phonics had basically been booted out of the classroom and that the state’s schoolchildren were doing progressively worse on reading assessment tests.
Her efforts culminated in a 1995 state law that required phonics and spelling to again become standard parts of school curriculum. She has continued to work on issues such as class-size reduction and teacher training.
Joseph, who said she had a good public school education, strongly supports religious education as long as it isn’t part of public schools. As a child, she attended supplementary religious school five days a week.
Born in New York, she moved with her family to Southern California when she was 9. A member of a Conservative congregation in Long Beach, south of Los Angeles, she proudly notes she was the second girl in California to celebrate a bat mitzvah.
Over her lifetime, she has remained involved in the Jewish community. She worked as a Hebrew teacher. She is a Hadassah member and a former member of Congregation Rodef Sholom in San Rafael.
She was also a member of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Relations Council’s education committee when she lived in Marin County.
Jackie Berman, the JCRC’s education specialist, was excited to hear about Joseph’s appointment to the state school board.
“Marion is one of the brightest, most astute people I know,” Berman said.
“She really cares.”
Despite Joseph’s belief that public education is the “heart of the democratic system,” she won’t condemn parents who place their children in private schools — even as a means to escape shoddy public schools.
She simply doesn’t believe any parent should sacrifice a child to an ideal.
“You take care of your child first,” she said, “then you work on fixing the system.”