John I. Goodlad, Progressive Educator, Dies at 94
NEW YORK TIMES, JAN. 1, 2015
By TAMAR LEWIN
Photo
John I. Goodlad in 1983, the year of his landmark school report. Credit Glen Martin/The Denver Post, via Getty Images
John I. Goodlad, an influential educator whose study of more than 27,000 students, teachers and administrators in the late 1970s and early ’80s documented the problems plaguing American public schools, died on Nov. 29 in Seattle. He was 94.
The cause was cancer, his son, Stephen, said.
Professor Goodlad, who taught for many years at the University of Washington and had earlier been dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles, was a progressive education reformer in the tradition of John Dewey. Many of his views — on the importance of early childhood education, for example, or on the need for better teacher training — remain central to the educational reform agenda.
He was best known for his comprehensive eight-year study involving classes from kindergarten through 12th grade in 38 schools in 13 communities. The project, sponsored by the Institute for the Development of Educational Activities, an independent research organization, and conducted with the help of more than 40 other researchers, published its findings in 1983.
The picture it painted, The New York Times reported at the time, was “a world of talky teachers and uninterested students, who work in a context of unclear goals and serious social and educational inequities.”
The study and a 1984 book by Professor Goodlad that grew out of it, “A Place Called School,” resonated widely in policy circles, in part because it appeared so closely on the heels of “A Nation at Risk,” the 1983 report by a presidential commission that concluded that American education was threatened by a rising tide of mediocrity.
“John’s most powerful teaching was that school is a moral enterprise, not just a matter of getting the right techniques and organizational structure,” said Jeannie Oakes, who worked with Mr. Goodlad on the school study and is now an emeritus education professor at U.C.L.A. “There has to be an understanding that schooling is central to our democracy, that teachers are responsible not only for the academic development of their students, but their social development and their development as citizens.”
John Inkster Goodlad was born on Aug. 19, 1920, in North Vancouver, British Columbia, and grew up in a mountain community nearby. He began his teaching career in a one-room schoolhouse with 34 children across eight grades, an experience that shaped many of his ideas, his son said. He came to see grade levels as arbitrary markers devised for adult convenience.
“He could see that the kids were really great at helping other kids learn, across the grade levels,” Stephen Goodlad said. “And he saw that just because you were at a certain age or grade level didn’t mean you were functioning at a certain level. What he saw there showed him that we had a system that didn’t make much sense.”
Professor Goodlad proposed a radically new model of schools, in which elementary school students would not be divided into specific grades and their work would not be graded.
He opposed tracking students by their skill levels, and he suggested that teachers should have a career path that, with experience and a doctoral degree, could lead to higher-paying jobs as a master teacher, working with professionals who were newer to the classroom.
At the University of Washington, Professor Goodlad and two other professors, Roger Soder and Kenneth Sirotnik, founded the Center for Educational Renewal to promote collaboration between schools and teacher-training institutions.
In 1992, the year after he retired from the university, Professor Goodlad founded an offshoot, the Institute for Educational Inquiry, which is devoted to strengthening the role of education in maintaining democracy.
In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Mary Paula Kamp, and five grandsons. His wife, Evalene, died in 2006.
“I have pondered for decades how he kept going, fighting the same fights over and over,” Stephen Goodlad said of his father. “I would have torn out my hair, or gone fishing.”
Professor Goodlad, incidentally, often did just that, his son said. He was an avid salmon fisherman at his summer home in the San Juan Islands of Washington State.
Professor Goodlad was hopeful but also realistic about changing how schools teach, and in a long career at the forefront of educational reform he learned lessons of his own.
“One of the things you learn is that good things keep recycling,” he said in 1993 in an interview with Technos Quarterly, a journal about the use of technology in education. “If it’s a good idea that doesn’t make it this time, it’ll make it next time.
“The other thing that you learn — and it’s discouraging — is that you’re always getting newcomers on the scene for the recycling process,” he continued. “That means the process of educational change and improvement never ends, because you’re always dealing with a new clientele, a new group of parents, a new group of administrators, a new group of teachers, and so on.
“Third, and most important,” he said, “would be that it doesn’t matter how many bills you pass and how many policies you lay down from on high — when it comes right down to it, the individual school has an incredible capacity for rejecting it passively or taking it on and doing something about it.”
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A version of this article appears in print on January 2, 2015, on page B11 of the New York edition with the headline: John I. Goodlad, Progressive Educator, Dies at 94