"Whither Schools of Education?" A Reaction: For All the Wrong Reasons.

In a few pages, John Goodlad dredges up the demon of status deprivation that has beset him for nearly a half century. Why can't schools, colleges, and departments of education (SCDEs) be valued and loved and respected like other professional schools? What is it about teacher education that makes SCDEs a pariah on so many campuses? Why do so many SCDEs flee from their professional role? Goodlad has a set of remedies--seven conditions or lessons derived from 19 postulates (presuppositions) and grounded on four moral principles, here labeled the humanitarian narrative. He informs those remedies from learnings gleaned from nearly a half century of attempting to build viable SCDEs as well as the experience of fashioning the National Network for Educational Renewal (NNER). From these experiences he also offers a set of structural remedies from Partner Schools to Centers of Pedagogy designed to respond to the conditions he portrays and possibilities he sees for the future. I read initially whither as a question about whether these unique and besieged institutions could possibly survive far into the coming millennium. I then considered the title and, knowing how carefully Goodlad uses words, consulted my dictionary. I learned that whither asks to what situation, position, degree, or end one will go. It became clear that Goodlad is suggesting that only if SCDEs are prepared to adopt both the humanitarian narrative and the set of conditions he describes will they survive long into the 21st century. In 1958, in his role of Director of Teacher Education at the University of Chicago, Goodlad addressed the teacher education establishment. In the aftermath of World War II and as a result of the Soviet launch of Sputnik, he observed, teacher education has been subjected to ... devastating blasts, and argued that its future depended upon remedying the deficiencies years ago diagnosed by its own most thoughtful leaders (p. 109). One of the solutions he proclaimed was that the main channels of American academic life must concern themselves seriously with teacher education (p. 110). He talked of the university as an inhospitable place for teacher education and offered a set of remedies that he has consistently returned to each time he has spoken or written about teacher education. He has expanded on them or refined the set of solutions, but there is a remarkable consistency about what he said then and what he offers today as the solution to the problem of status deprivation. As he has moved from Chicago to Atlanta, from Los Angeles to Seattle, Goodlad has been persistent in arguing for a set of core principles and a new structure for teacher education need (p. 112) to overcome the problem of status deprivation. In Goodlad's (1990) major contribution to the field, Teachers for Our Nation's Schools, he examined the strange, elusive relationship between general approval and specific rejection (p. 70) of teacher education and queried why policymakers and college leaders so little love SCDEs. As evidence of failure to respond, Goodlad asserts that the public and academy have failed repeatedly to respond to the needs of teacher education since the 1960s. He cites Conant (1963), Smith (1980), Clifford and Guthrie (1988), and Judge (1982) as having addressed major problems of teacher education relative to higher education but concludes that college and university leaders failed to respond. Here, as elsewhere, he is asking why this neglect. (It is interesting to note Conant's acknowledgment that Goodlad provided him with the essential knowledge of the details of teacher training. (Conant, 1962, p. v) He leaves unexamined whether these four studies were seminal or what was done to bring them to the attention of policymakers and college and university leaders. I question why he selected these four studies and not the Holmes Group (1995) trilogy, several AACTE documents (particularly Howsam, Corrigan, Denemak, & Nash, 1976), or the more recent work of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future. …