Today’s Wall Street Journal includes a front-page story that features San Bernardino political activist and school board candidate Joseph Turner (pictured right). Read the WSJ article here. The piece details Turner’s effort last summer to place an anti-illegal-immigration measure on the ballot in the City of San Bernardino, and asserts that while the effort fell short (due to a judge’s interference – read about that here), it inspired successful similar efforts in at least 10 cities in other parts of the country.
Turner’s initiative, entitled the "City of San Bernardino Illegal Immigrant Relief Act," would have revoked the license of any business deemed to aid or abet illegal immigrants, banned landlords from renting to illegals, and prohibited the city from conducting business in any language other than English. A field representative for Riverside County Republican Assemblyman Ray Haynes, Turner founded a group called “Save Our State,” which stages demonstrations at Home Depot day-laborer pickup sites. He and his group are frequently featured on nationwide news broadcasts and other media, including L.A.’s top-rated “John and Ken” KFI 640 radio talk show.
Despite his efforts’ high profile in California (whose Democrat-controlled Legislature continually passes bills to grant things like driver’s licenses and in-state college tuition to illegal aliens), it seems those efforts, thanks in part to Internet communications, have helped ignite a nationwide resurgence of anti-illegal-immigration sentiment. That sentiment has purportedly impacted public policy in places such as North Carolina, which turned back a “bipartisan” bill to grant illegals a subsidized in-state tuition entitlement, and Georgia, which passed a comprehensive anti-illegal-immigration bill.
Now that Turner is a County GOP-backed candidate for the governing board of the San Bernardino City Unified School District, he’s taking aim at one of the more liberal districts in San Bernardino County, serving an urban area that educates more Latino students than any other race. Turner’s rhetoric is ready made for a lively campaign in a district whose policies have drawn local criticism of late. Even if he’s elected in November, Turner would probably not be able to do much about the requirement that public schools educate illegal aliens – a situation to which he strongly objects. But he has a laundry list of reasons behind his first campaign promise, which is to “fire the superintendent.”
Turner’s election bid on November 7 could further blur the line between his activism among federal, state and local government policies on more than one issue. Consider, as Board of Equalization Member Bill Leonard recently pointed out in his September 13 issue of The Leonard Letter, the content of an “in-service seminar” presented to teachers at the Victor Valley Union High School District. At the seminar, a San Bernardino City Unified representative gave a talk on “new professionalism,” wherein he urged teachers to consider students’ backgrounds when determining how to respond to students who, say, curse them out. Ray Culberson, the San Bernardino district’s director of youth services, was quoted as saying, “students today have less respect for authority than they did when many teachers were in school and consequently, some teachers have unrealistic expectations of their students."
Observed Mr. Leonard, “Culberson asked teachers to think about how many times a day they can personally tolerate being sworn at by students. Teachers who have a low tolerance level will not be as able to calmly follow school procedures as teachers with a high tolerance level.” Read more about it here. “I believe we do our students a grave disservice by tolerating vulgarity and disrespect, no matter what their backgrounds,” Leonard wrote. In fact, it is illegal for students to threaten or address their teachers using profanity.
What bothered opinion page editor Steve Williams of the Daily Press in Victorville as much as the advice given by Culberson was the educator’s defense given in response to an outcry from the High Desert area, where the Victorville seminar took place. In the Desert, such student behavior is rarely, if ever, tolerated. Culberson explained to the Daily Press that he’d devoted just five minutes of his two-hour presentation to teacher toleration of such behavior, and that, as Williams paraphrased Culberson, “he’d made similar presentations expressing his ‘New Professional’ theories at any number of schools in the Southland, and that he’d never heard any serious objections before.” Williams responded, “That’s doubtless because most news outlets don’t bother to cover such presentations, feeling there’s not much news value to a two-hour lecture on how to handle the new age in a classroom. That, of course, leaves the public unaware of what’s going on in those classrooms. Fortunately, one of the teachers in attendance was irritated enough to call and tell us about it. Our report was quickly followed by the outrage.” While Williams credited High Desert teachers and parents for responding, he criticized the local district’s board and administration for saying nothing. Read Williams’ column here.
So what did Turner have to say about this? He’s beside himself. “(Culberson’s) perspective is diametrically opposite to mine,” said Turner, who was further frustrated when he heard an incumbent San Bernardino School Board Member – a Republican – “singing (Culberson’s) praises” in the waiting area on the night of the County Republican Party’s Endorsements Committee meeting earlier this month.
“How demoralizing must it be for a teacher when the district basically says you must endure being publicly berated, humiliated and disrespected by abusive and potentially violent students?” Turner asked. “How exactly does that lend itself to a conducive learning environment for the other students? This is a policy that’s bad for the teachers and students, and the ‘abusive’ student as well, because society will not tolerate that behavior or give them a free pass when they enter the real world.”