1920-
Dean, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Los Angeles

A Teacher's Teacher.

John Goodlad, author of a landmark 1980s study of American education titled A Place Called School, began his teaching career in a rural one-room school. Since that time he has taught at every grade level from first grade through advanced graduate work. During the quarter-century preceding the 1980s, he inquired into the nature of schooling at all levels in more than ten countries. As dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles, he read the numerous reports published in the late 1970s that contended that American education had gone seriously wrong. Dissatisfied with their alarmist tone and simplistic suggestions, Goodlad set out to write a study of schooling that identified what was actually going on in American schools. Because he believed that most school improvement...