Her Best Subject : When it comes to making schools better, Marion Joseph works overtime. Reading is her latest target.

Marion Joseph insists she would like to stop being a nag.

After all, she’s 69, she retired 13 years ago from her powerful behind-the-scenes post as a state Department of Education strategist, and she’d like to spend more time gardening, lunching with friends and playing with her grandchildren.

But she can’t help herself.

There’s too much to be done. Too many kids aren’t learning to read. She knows how to fix it and who can make it right. And she’s more than willing to pick up the phone and tell them to get busy.

“Would I like to stop?” she asks rhetorically, sitting next to the rarely used pool behind her comfortable ranch house. “Yes. Can I stop? No. Never. Knowing what I know gives me added responsibility.”

That credo, that sense of obligation to participate in a democracy according to one’s talents, pushed her to volunteer in school board elections nearly 40 years ago. It made her set up neighborhood tutoring programs in the 1960s for poor children.

It got her behind the campaign of Wilson Riles, who, largely because of a strategy she devised, won a long-shot victory in 1970 to become the first African American to hold a statewide elective office in California. And it guided her during 12 years as his top adviser as they worked to improve schooling for the disabled, the poor and the very young.

“She knocked herself out to get the job done, she understood the Legislature, she knew the players there and she knew how to work with them,” says Riles, who now works as an educational consultant in Sacramento.

As with all her endeavors, working in the Riles Administration wasn’t a job or a career move. And Joseph, a woman so tiny she must sit on the edge of her chair for her feet to touch the floor, says she gave little thought to her stature as a powerful woman in a largely male world. She simply had a mission. “I had to go into the department because I had promised the people of California ‘God knows what’ if they would elect Wilson Riles, and it was very important that there be delivery on that promise.”

Now, having reached an age at which society expects people to begin handing off their duties to the next generation, Joseph is in the thick of a fight once again--and this time, it’s personal.

In all her years in education, Joseph had never focused on reading instruction. Then, in 1989, her beloved grandson Isaac, a Bay Area first-grader, began having trouble sounding out words. But, in keeping with the state’s official “whole language” teaching method, his teacher did not offer phonics exercises involving letter sounds. Instead, she gave Isaac a book of stories in hopes that he would acquire reading skills and develop an appreciation of literature. Yet he could not read it.

Joseph and her daughter, Linda, set out to see what they could do. Testing showed that Isaac, though extremely bright, had a problem that crops up in roughly one in five children: the inability to discern the letter sounds, or phonemes, that are the building blocks of words.

Joseph hired a specially trained tutor for Isaac, now a Central Valley seventh-grader who tests at or above grade level in all subjects.

“Instead of continuing to get further and further behind, he got further and further ahead, thanks to my mother,” says Linda Joseph, a school psychologist.

But Marion Joseph didn’t stop there. “She basically fixed that . . . and then went on to making things better for all kids,” Linda says.

Since then, Marion Joseph has become the most influential voice arguing that the state’s 1987 plunge into a progressive theory of how children learn to read went too far and is not working.

She doesn’t work in public. Rather, like an unpaid lobbyist, she works the levers of power behind the scenes. She calls journalists who have written stories she believes are favorable and urges them to write more. She coaches legislative and Education Department staff members on how to maneuver around bureaucratic roadblocks. She arranges for researchers to present their findings to key policy-makers. And she relies on “moles,” as she calls them, to tip her off to proposed policies so she can press for language that suits her purpose.

Most of this happens from an unimposing command post in a spare bedroom at home, where a fax machine hums constantly with news from the front, which she then sends right back out to her troops--a growing battalion of parents, researchers and teachers.

“It was so nice to hear her say there were teachers up and down the state who felt like I did,” says Patty Abarca, a pro-phonics first-grade teacher in Maywood who contacted Joseph after seeing her name in a newspaper article. “I just had the classroom experience, but she had the research to back it up.”

Maureen DiMarco, top education adviser to Gov. Pete Wilson, says Joseph sometimes calls her as late as 11 p.m. to quiz her about some intricacy of policy. “And if it is truly critical, you’ll get another call at 6 a.m., reminding you of the conversation of the night before,” DiMarco adds.

DiMarco credits Joseph with creating momentum for change by spreading the word about problems with reading and gathering research to suggest solutions. “She set the stage for having it fixed,” DiMarco says.

Former state schools Supt. Bill Honig, who was in office when California adopted its progressive instructional methods, agrees. “I don’t think any of this would have happened without Marion. It became her whole life.”

*

Last spring, only a few months after she took office, state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin appointed Joseph to a high-level task force on reading. In September it issued a step-by-step prescription for improving beginning reading instruction that Eastin has vowed to carry out.

“I give Delaine credit for doing what she said she would do during the campaign,” Joseph says. “She went public, she didn’t blame the parents and the kids, and she said [the state] made a mistake.”

The same month, Wilson signed legislation requiring the state to adopt books that include lessons in phonics and spelling--two activities that had virtually disappeared from California schools.

But back when Isaac was struggling, Joseph often felt “like a voice crying in the wilderness.”

The first thing she did was run through her fat Rolodex of statewide contacts--superintendents who had worked on Riles’ campaigns, school board members who had served on committees, principals who had testified on behalf of legislation. The message she heard was unmistakable: Many kids were not learning to read. So she immediately convened a meeting to talk about what had gone wrong.

Its focus was the whole language instructional method that has guided teacher training, textbook purchases and, in many schools, classroom practices for eight years. Before 1987, many schools here and across the country taught reading by drilling skills--the short “a” sound, for example, or the sound of blends, such as “ch” or “sh.” But educators began to complain that students almost never spent time with fairy tales or children’s classics because they were so busy completing exercises in workbooks or reading passages designed only to reinforce skills.

Given education’s penchant for extreme responses, it is perhaps not surprising that the state went overboard in its reaction. Whole language backers believe children need very little instruction in spelling, grammar or the link between letters and letter patterns and their sounds. The idea is that they acquire skills through exposure to stories that snag their interest. And, whole language supporters argue, children need not sound out every word, just enough words to understand the text.

First developed in the United States, the theory gained wide acceptance in New Zealand and Australia, and interest in it exploded just as California went looking for something new. Joseph says she endorses many aspects of whole language: the focus on literature, the emphasis on comprehension, the attention to writing. But, she says, kids must be taught the basics as well.

“The evidence is overwhelmingly, compellingly, against whole language, and those who object to that evidence say research is not important,” says Joseph, who sticks out her jaw and puts up clenched fists when talking about opponents.

National test scores released in 1993 and again in 1995 seemed to confirm that something had gone wrong: More than half of the state’s fourth-graders were unable to read well enough to learn the meaning of basic texts. To many, including Joseph, the poor showing proved her point. The test scores were among the factors that prompted Eastin to appoint the reading task force.

*

But Joseph’s strong views, and her insistence on seeing them reflected in the recent task force report, almost blew up the mission.

She “is unashamedly convinced of her position and she speaks about it in a very enthusiastic but respectful way,” says Bertha Pendleton, the superintendent of schools in San Diego who co-chaired the panel.

Pendleton acknowledges, however, that task force meetings became “a bit tense . . . when it was felt that she did more than she needed to do to convince us.”

In the end, the panel would stress the importance of balancing whole language approaches with a healthy dose of phonics. For Joseph, that constituted a victory. “Too often the parents in this state have been led to believe it’s just their child, and teachers have been told that something’s wrong with them, that they have not been able to teach children this way,” she says. “I know it’s awful for them.”

Joseph learned about getting involved in the issues of the day from her parents, Irving and Rose Rabinowitz, who brought her to Long Beach at 9. He was a Russian Jew and liberal Democrat who after World War II raised money for pro-Israel and civil rights causes. She served many causes and continued helping out elderly neighbors, running errands and delivering food, into her 80s. Marion was an only child until her parents adopted twin girls who had survived Auschwitz.

Jay Leff, a Long Beach retiree who has known Joseph since childhood, says she was “vivacious, magnetic” and always the center of attention at Woodrow Wilson High School, where she was the graduation speaker. Over the years, despite arguments, she has been a steadfast, devoted friend, always ready to help. “When you’re that positive about things, you don’t like anybody else to have any differing opinions,” he says.

Indeed, her many friends say Joseph is just as committed to keeping up relationships as she is to political causes.

“She’s caring, loyal, the kind of person who, if you called her in the middle of the night, she’d be there for you,” says Norma Rappaport, a longtime friend who lives in Davis.

Joseph was 20 and a UCLA junior when she met fellow student David Joseph in the spring of 1946. They married in December of that year and remained in Los Angeles while David, a marine biologist who became a pioneer in the area of controlling water pollution, earned a doctorate.

By the time they moved to Sacramento in 1958, the couple had three children--Linda, Daniel and Nancy. And Marion, whose degree was in political science, realized she would have to scrap her plan of attending law school.

Looking for an intellectual challenge, she volunteered for Democratic Party causes and local school board races. The job of a campaign, she believed, was to identify influential people, sell them on an issue or candidate, and then get them to work on their friends. “In those days, a campaign was people politics, not TV politics,” she says.

That strategy would later help Wilson Riles, a tall, articulate speaker whom Joseph admired for his work on education programs for poor children, defeat incumbent Max Rafferty, a right-wing ideologue whom most educators disliked. She targeted moderate Republicans for support in the nonpartisan race and had Riles hit Rotary Clubs, PTA meetings and living room teas from Oregon to Mexico. The campaign ran on a shoestring but it worked.

“We had organizations in every county in the state and people just loved Wilson Riles,” says Joseph, her sparkling dark eyes and broad smile showing that she still savors the victory.

Bill Whiteneck, a highly respected legislative consultant who worked with Joseph under Riles, says her enthusiasm has not faded a bit.

“She has this incredible instinct to sense that something is not right and then to muster energy that is just phenomenal and . . . nag the hell out of you to pay attention.”

*

That intensity puts some people off. In the state Department of Education, she was either loved or hated. She had no patience with bureaucratic niceties. What was right was right. And what was wrong simply was not tolerated.

Davis Campbell, executive director of the California School Boards Assn., also worked with Joseph in the department. He recalls the time officials were about to distribute an instructional guide on genetics that included a picture of Adolf Hitler. Joseph demanded that it be changed. “It didn’t matter how many had been printed, because it was wrong,” Campbell says.

“People react to her as they do to any crusader--she asks hard questions, she challenges people’s thinking, she is not patient with delays,” says Lorna Winter, a longtime friend who is now a consultant with the Education Department. “She makes people stop and think. Whether they agree or not, she’s made them think.”

When Joseph retired in 1982, the year Bill Honig defeated Riles in his bid for a fourth term, her plan was to dabble in the family’s fledgling flower and herb nursery in Marin County, but, characteristically, she logged 14-hour days, marketing the products throughout the Bay Area. She also worked in local political campaigns and as a county chairman for Michael Dukakis’ 1988 presidential bid.

In 1991, her husband died of a brain hemorrhage. She cared for him until the end. “Because she is . . . a person who has solutions, who has in her mind all the answers and knows the way it ought to be done, imagine her frustration at not being able to fix it when David got sick,” says Norma Rappaport.

But Linda Joseph says her mother quickly picked up and went on. There was work to do.

In 1994, Marion Joseph showed up uninvited to an “education summit” that former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown was hosting in San Francisco. Many education insiders say the buzz about reading problems picked up intensity there.

Campbell recalls seeing a knot of people in the Westin St. Francis hotel ballroom surrounding Joseph. “She had no portfolio, no office, and there she was at the center and making no bones about it,” he says. “It was wonderful.”

Observers say her greatest coup, however, was teaming up with Honig last year. Although he had pushed for the progressive reading methods, Honig began studying the issue again after leaving office in 1993 on conflict-of-interest charges. He concluded that California’s mistake was in not stressing the need for both good literature and basic skills in the early grades.

At Joseph’s insistence, he wrote a book analyzing existing reading research. It will be published commercially early next year, but pre-publication copies are circulating across the country. On her own, Joseph was “too fiery,” says Honig, who has set up a consulting group to help school districts redesign reading instruction. Together, they had more clout.

*

Now, the results of five years of work are beginning to play out. At its October meeting, the California Board of Education discussed how to implement the task force report.

Joseph sat in the audience, arms crossed, jaw set, rocking on the edge of her folding chair. She had briefed several of the participants on what they were to say. And her body language reflected the turns in the debate.

A gambit she considered too cautious brought a groan and a sudden convulsion, as if she’d been punched in the solar plexus. Board member Kathryn Dronenburg’s request for a step-by-step plan for fixing the problem, however, stirred an under-the-breath exclamation.

“Good girl!” Joseph said in a loud whisper. “That’s called getting it together!”

Some days, she exults in the progress that’s occurred. Other days, she despairs.

But she doesn’t plan to quit any time soon.

“There are people who wish I would have gone away a long time ago,” she says. “That’s not an issue for me. This had nothing to do with me. I would have liked to have gone away a long time ago. I’m 69 and I’d like to play. But I don’t have a choice. I have to see it through.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Marion Joseph

Age: 69.

Background: Born in New York, now lives in Menlo Park.

Family: Three children. Linda, a school psychologist; Daniel, a Benicia real estate agent, and Nancy, a Menlo Park dental hygienist.

Passions: Opera, theater, cooking, gardening, watching national policy debates on C-SPAN and spending time with her three grandchildren: Isaac, 12; Rachel, 11, and Jillian, 4.

On the importance of public education: “We have to make public education work because under any other system . . . those without will get the least and we will have a separation in our society that is outrageous to me.”

On the current malaise with politics: “The feeling we had in the late 1960s and 1970s was that people could influence what their government would be like. I’m really saddened that people no longer feel that way and that political campaigns have become just advertising spots.”

On the importance of educational research: “There should never be any mass rush to a new curricular approach in teaching unless there is ample evidence . . . over a long enough period of time to demonstrate that it works.”