Place Called School, A

John Goodlad's A Place Called School, published in 1984, is the chief fruit of what is generally [Page 656]considered the most extensive on-site examination of U.S. schools ever undertaken. Deftly combining quantitative and qualitative data, Goodlad offers both a robust portrait of that place called “school” and a broad agenda for improvement. Goodlad's account of the commonplaces of schooling, the competing functions of schools, the explicit and implicit curriculum, and the circumstances of teaching make it a landmark in curriculum studies.

The 4-year “Study of Schooling” was motivated in part by Goodlad's concern that many prior efforts at school improvement had proceeded in ignorance of how schools actually function. In contrast, the study that Goodlad devised is legendary in scope, drawing data from 7 geographic areas, 13 communities, 38 schools, 1,350 teachers, 8,624 parents, and 17,163 students. Although the study generated many specific technical reports, A Place Called School is Goodlad's synthesis of his key findings. Combining quantitative datasuch as proportional measurements of time spent on instruction, behavior management, and social activitywith thicker, qualitative descriptions, Goodlad illuminates the characteristic features of U.S. teachers, classrooms, and curricula.

A Place Called School confirms much of our conventional wisdom about schools and their organization, but the documentation of these “commonplaces” (a term adapted from Joseph Schwab) is one of Goodlad's achievements. He helps us to see, name, and understand the elements that make up the underlying “grammar” of schooling (to use David Tyack's later term). For example, Goodlad reminds us that schools fulfill two fundamentally different functions, the custodial and the educational, and that the latter comprises competing academic, intellectual, social, personal, and vocational aims. He shows us teachers who are disconnected from each other, but at home in their classrooms; parents relatively pleased with their child's school, while pessimistic about the status of schooling in general; dull, didactic instructional practices and disengaged students. It is not only that Goodlad brings such commonplaces into sharp focus, but that his study offers the data to establish them as generalizable features of schooling, rather than simply properties of this or that school. His careful mapping of the interpersonal, political, and phenomenological landscape of schooling provides a crucial check against headlong school reform.

Goodlad also warned that reform must not be attempted in a piecemeal fashion, but must be mindful of the interactions among the many components of the whole. His notion of the school as a “total entity” has been important for curriculum studies. For Goodlad, curriculum must be considered in the context of the whole school culture. For example, a curricular reform may fail because it ignores how teachers are trained. Goodlad unapol-ogetically delivers the bitter medicine that school improvement is necessarily a complex and extended undertaking.

Goodlad's own proposals for reform have unfortunately been somewhat overshadowed by his comprehensive and perspicacious portrait of the school. Clearly tied to the study's data, his proposals in fact merit careful consideration. Goodlad offers two kinds of proposals for reform. The first type involves adjustments to schools as they currently operate (for example, he suggests shifting more authority to local school personnel, and enabling teachers to spend more time preparing lessons during the school day), and the second type challenges basic assumptions of current schooling practice on a more fundamental level (for example, having children attend schools from age 4 to age 16, establishing nongraded classrooms where older students help younger students, and integrating school with other community educational institutions such as the home, television, and public library).

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