Reading Researcher and Founding Father of Whole Language.

Ken Goodman, Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona, died peacefully in his sleep on March 12, 2020 at the desert oasis home that he shared with his wife Yetta Goodman.  Ken was 92 years old.  Ken joined in Yetta’s 89th birthday celebration on March 10.  His last days were full of love, laughter and the sounds of family, surrounded by daughters Debi (Cheryl), Karen, and Wendy (with the memory of Bob); grandchildren Eli (Marcy), Reuben (Retsina), Aaron (Julie), Shoshana (Justin), Josh (Kayleen), Noah, and Rachel; and fourteen great-grandchildren (Julia, Ezrial, Juliette, Madison, Levi, Arabella, Austin, Camilla, Kennedy, Isaiah, Shirley, Michaela, Guinevere, and Ava). 

Ken and Yetta Goodman celebrated their 67th wedding anniversary on June 15, 2019—partners in life and partners in their world-changing research on reading.  They were also co-activists, advocating for public schools, for students’ rights to learn, and for the professionalism of teachers.  In their work and their daily lives, they opened their arms, their home, and their family to students, colleagues, visiting scholars, relatives, and friends.  In return, they were loved by educators around the globe.

Ken was a nurturing person who encouraged all around him to grow and flourish, sharing widely his love of gardening and cooking (and eating).  He was a gardener whose thumb remained green throughout his life.   In the fall, he welcomed new U of A graduate students with olive picking parties at the 10^th Street house in Tucson and he cured the olives himself. He got his orchids to bloom in profusion the week before he died.  He served tacos in Detroit before they became popular, reinvented crepes that the family called “Grandpa Kenny’s pancakes,” and explored international cooking to honor doctoral students when they finished their dissertations or for almost any occasion.

Ken’s education began at age four in Chicago public schools. He moved to Detroit when he was seven, graduating from Northwestern High School at age 15.  He grew up in an Eastern European Jewish family. His father, Max Goodman, immigrated at age nine searching for the American dream.  His mother, Rose Berman, the oldest in a large family, left school after 8^th grade to work in the family store in Dekalb, Illinois. She always regretted not going to high school and instilled a love of learning in her three children – all completed advanced degrees.  As he grew older, Ken’s interest in his family roots deepened.  The children’s book he wrote, The Smart One, is based on Max Goodman’s shtetl life in Smorgon, Lithuania (now Belarus).

Ken’s world view was influenced by growing up among immigrants, by the cultural and political conversations of his older sister Shirley (Goodman) Rapoport and his brother Calvin Goodman, and by union and civil rights activism in Detroit and Ann Arbor. He picketed Briggs stadium because the Detroit Tigers were not integrated.  He worked in Detroit auto plants in the summer as a union organizer. He took off a year from college to campaign for Henry Wallace.

            After attending the University of Michigan, Ken moved to Los Angeles and met Yetta when they were both counselors in Jewish Center summer camps. He finished his BA in Economics at UCLA, earned a Master’s degree in Education and became a junior high teacher. Ken returned to UCLA for his Doctorate of Education, working with John Goodlad.

Ken and Yetta, with their three daughters, moved to Detroit in 1962. He taught at Wayne State University, and founded the field of Miscue Analysis Research, with funded Reading Miscue Research Labs first at Wayne State and later at the University of Arizona. Ken cultivated a community of linguists, educators, teachers, and researchers exploring language and thinking – a field known as pscyholinguistics.  Ken Goodman and Yetta joined the Department of Language, Reading and Culture at the University of Arizona in 1975. In the relaxed Southwest, freed from business suit attire, he adopted his signature bolo ties and matching belt buckles, crafted by local Diné artists.

Kenneth Goodman leaves an unparalleled legacy.  His socio-psycholinguistic transactional theory of the reading process is the most widely cited in the world.  Ken’s research involved documenting readers in a range of communities, languages, and dialects as they read aloud and then retold whole stories.  This methodology supported a growing movement for qualitative research. By analyzing students’ unexpected responses to print while reading (Ken called these miscues), and later, their eye movements as they read, Ken’s research shifted basic understandings regarding the centrality of meaning-making with its dependence on predicting, and the nature of written language.

Goodman’s theory of reading is a practical theory.   It informs theoretical scholarship about written language, and it deeply informs practice.   It provides teachers with an accessible means of learning about their students as readers and a theoretically grounded way of influencing their own teaching.  It encouraged kids to read real books and was responsible for the increasing popularity of children’s literature.  And it was foundational in the theory-in-practice known as Whole Language.

Denny Taylor posted in Garn Press, “By common consent, Ken Goodman was one of the greatest—the greatest—reading researchers of the 20th Century. He was a fearless advocate for teachers and children—an empathetic, moral force—whose reading theories based on his disciplined, systematic and utterly brilliant miscue research have been proved right over and over again. Working closely with Yetta, a giant in the reading field in her own right, Ken Goodman will continue to be a force for good in an increasingly fragile world.”

                                                                                                                        

 Additional information is available at Ken and Yetta Goodman's homepage.
 The Goodman family will be having a memorial service in the spring or summer.  For those who would like to make a donation in Ken Goodman’s honor, please consider the following organizations:

HIAS: Welcome the stranger. Protect the Refugee

Ken and Yetta Goodman’s families came to the US as immigrant refugees from Eastern Europe. From the website: “HIAS works around the world to protect refugees who have been forced to flee their homelands because of who they are, including ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. For more than 130 years, HIAS has been helping refugees rebuild their lives in safety and dignity.”

Literacies and Languages for All 

(Formerly Whole Language Umbrella)

Ken Goodman is considered the founding father of whole language and was Honorary Past President of the first Whole Language Umbrella board.  LLA is a professional conference of the National Council of Teachers of English. Donations can be designated to supporting the Literacies for All Summer Institute, or to the scholarship fund to send teachers to this summer conference. 

To donate to LLA in Ken Goodman’s honor, click here.

Raven Totem

     
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

My cruise ship brought me back to Hoonah, Alaska after many years. As I moved along the walkway from the ship I saw a raven sitting motionless staring at me. He did not move a feather as I took this picture.

The Tlingits say:
 If Raven has come visiting you it can mean any number of things.

 Most powerful of all is the synchronicity that Raven assures you is pending.

He is a master of bending and folding time and space so that you are exactly in the right moment at the right time. As a messenger you are reminded that those around you are reflecting back at you the things you most have to learn about yourself.

Know that when Raven appears that magic is imminent. Raven is about rebirth, recovery, renewal, recycling and certainly reflection and healing.

He signifies moving through transitions smoothly by casting light into the darkness. 

An Open Letter to Bernie Sanders

An Open Letter to Bernie Sanders                                                   April 12, 2016                

From Ken Goodman

 Kgoodman @u.arizona.edu

http://www.thosegoodmans.net/

Dear Senator Sanders,

Every four years for a very long time (I am 88) a have addressed an open letter to the in-coming President of the United States on the subject of public education. If your background includes any Yiddish (My father was a Litvak) you may understand” Iz helfen vi a toiten bankus” (rough translation “It didn’t help at all”)

Actually, the educational policies of every President, Republican or Democratic in that whole time has been detrimental to the great traditions of public education. I applaud your campaign commitment to free universal higher education. But our elementary and secondary schools are so poorly supported   and the national and state educational policies have so degraded our teachers and public schools that large numbers of students will not be able to go to even free universities.

No aspect of American society is more important than adequate free public schools: safe and inviting places for our future generations under the guidance of professional teachers dedicated to accepting all learners and supporting their growth toward whatever each is capable of achieving. Public schools are the one institution in society with the potential to reach every child.

But the conditions of our nation’s public schools have suffered under financial neglect and open attack. Simply speaking our public schools are the last socialized aspect of American society and that makes them the relentless target of free-market think tanks on behalf of their corporate funders.

In developing nations , education exists at three levels: Those who have the means pay for private schools which vary in quality in proportion to their price. Public schools serve mainly the working poor. And large numbers of children of poverty are not in school at all or leave after one or two years.

That’s the goal of the anti-public school campaigns in this country. Big business sees no need to educate any more than a small elite group of technicians and managers to run the increasingly digitized production lines. Why pay taxes to educate anybody else? And besides too much education and literacy produces trouble makers. But they also want to control the curriculum and methods of education. And while they are at it they would like to earn profits on texts and tests. Lots and lots of tests.

Laws disguised as reforms, such as No Child Left Behind where really designed to assure the failure of public schools by imposing archaic curriculum, absurd testing, and unattainable criteria for judging school success.

No Child Left Behind was successfully sold to the minority communities as reform intended to help their children. In fact, it was a calculated attempt to make public education appear to be a failure. It used a punitive approach, setting unattainable goals and then punishing the staff and school districts for failure to achieve them. Many schools had entire faculties dismissed and the school turned over  to  for-profit charters or contractors who employed uncertified teachers. In Philadelphia, Detroit, Oakland, and New Orleans among other urban cities the entire school systems have been taken over by the state losing any local input. Then the schools have gotten worse.

But the only way to make profit running these charter schools is to raise class size, reduce services, and replace teachers with machines and less qualified personnel.

At no time in our history have teachers been so poorly treated. The United States has the best educated teachers in the world, but they are  constrained from doing what they know how to do and they are blamed for poor results while teaching in decaying sometimes dangerous schools with inadequate materials. Many fine teachers are driven out of teaching within the first five years in the classroom.

Teachers are so poorly paid that they often need food stamps to put food on the table for their own families. It is no exaggeration that many retired teachers are still paying off their student loans.

Many American children are spending their days in inadequate decaying buildings with poor sanitation. It is a national shame that our politicians are more concerned about incarcerating our youth than educating them.

Ironically, in spite of all attempts to destroy it, American public education is damaged but not broken. Due to dedicated and well educated teachers and professional administrators most American children get a pretty good education in public schools. Unfortunately, that is likely to be strongly dependent on zip code.

Senator Sanders, you’ve done a good job laying out the issues facing our people. Of all the problems you have exposed none is more significant to the future of American education than free universal public education . Education must be extended to three to five year olds on one end and higher education on the other. 

Parents and teachers together are ready to support a platform of making education the highest national priority. I believe this is also the issue that can put you over the top.

Sincerely,

Ken Goodman,

Professor emeritus. University of Arizona

Past President, International Literacy Association,

Past President, National Conference on Research in Literacy

The end of the two party system .

Trump and Sanders: America’s Alter- Egos and the end of the two party system

Perhaps the most important aspect of the 2016 Presidential election has largely been missed. It is the rejection by American voters of the two party system.

 It’s been apparent that the Republican party has lost control of its process for choosing its presidential nominee and faces a dilemma of Donald Trump winning their nomination or taking it away from him and fracturing at their convention. But this is only a symptom of a much more important event: the American electorate is showing by their voting patterns that they no longer accept the two party system that has dominated national politics.

The pundits have struggled to understand the relationship of the defection on the Republican side to Donald Trump and on the Democratic side to Bernie Sanders. The reason in both cases is that they have massively rejected the two party system. 

All through the primary season the news coverage has had to throw away voting models in trying to explain each Tuesday or Saturday what voters did. The old ways of predicting results didn’t work.

And each week, no matter how much money the array of wannabees on the Republican side spent it could not buy votes. Yet Donald Trump seemed to get votes simply by saying outrageous things no party politician would ever say. while a 74 year old Jewish Socialist Senator came out of nowhere to mount a serious challenge to Hillary Clinton. 

In both cases the voters no longer were willing to support the two party system. Perhaps what finally got through to voters was the 8-year outrageous behavior of a Congress so dysfunctional that it almost brought the government down several times.

As they disserted the party candidates the electorate fractured, not on the red and blue lines the parties had drawn. They divided between two alter egos of American voters both the product of the persistent way party politicians steered voters away from what they really stood for by framing their beliefs as something quite different.

The Republicans have for years built their platform around the idea that the enemy of the middle class and working class people is “big government," which threatened their jobs with too much regulation and took too much out of their pay checks with taxes. Somehow, from their offices in Washington, they made Washington the enemy.  They created a block of largely male working class voters who voted against their own class interests.  “Washington” was favoring those dangerous foreigners, blacks, Hispanics and women and discriminating again white, Christian, regular Americans. 

So one American alterego distrusts government and believes that “They” are taking America away from us. They don’t like all that politically correct stuff and believe that the second amendment is the most important thing in the Constitution. "They" want to take our guns away. 

These folks get their news and views from radio talk shows and have great fear and anger at change.

The other alterego is evident in the changing social attitudes toward difference of all kinds. Gay marriage and alternate life styles have become acceptable to them. They care about the environment and drive energy efficient cars. 

They believe that the real problems of modern industrial society can really only be solved together and that they are problems that require government to be responsible for dealing with them.

 They get their information on-line and distrust network news and media controlled by big business.  They trust the fake news more than the conventional media.They want the issues to be confronted honestly and fairly and they expect the best knowledge to guide government decisions.   And they don’t like the way politicians hide their beliefs in political doublespeak.

 They see the Democratic party drifting in policies and action farther and farther to the right avoiding confrontation of the serious issues and trading perpetuation of policies that favored the multinational corporations in return for support of their campaigns.    They want to have a government that make things happen.  And socialism is not a bad word if it means being concerned for each other and not beating up on each other.                                                                             .                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

This alterego is embraced by young people who have always been more idealistic and impatient for action to solve problems. They connect with each other through smart phones and social media and prefer the fake news which exposes the hypocrisy of politicians and distrust conventional media.

Trump and Sanders represent well these American alter egos.

Even their names tell it: The Don

 He’s the self-proclaimed winner of winners; He’s rich and powerful. His name  is  on everything. Disdainful of losers (and they are so many to be disdained) destined to rule. What is good for him is good for all. He can do no wrong and is ruthless to all who get in his way. He preaches hate of others and contempt for the weak. He shoots from the hip, takes no prisoners, and the ends always justify the means.

And plain Bernie.

Unadorned, independent consistent, truth speaking. He’s S/socialist with big and little S.  A son of Jewish immigrants, proudly Jewish but more likely to cite history than God. His mantra is equality for all.  His priorities are health, education, fair wages, fair elections, fair laws, and a continuous revolution to preserve those priorities. He would provide free higher education, single payer medicare for all, and massive programs to provide jobs by rebuilding the infrastructure by taxing speculation. And he would reform campaign financing and the broken criminal justice system.

These are the alter egos that are America in the twenty-first century. Each truly American. And the electorate has polarized around them because the two party system has failed to govern. The Republicans and Democrats were for a long time two sides of the same coin, both funded and at the bidding of the moneyed interest  while maintaining an apparent choice between conservative and liberal versions of the same status quo.

This election made apparent to voters just how badly the two party politics had failed. Republicans after 8 years devoted to negating any Obama initiative, offered up a sleazy array of Republican politicians in a primary system rigged to favor a candidate who could say patriotic inanities while following the dictates of the rich. And along came the Donald, brashly proclaiming himself Mr. macho America who could do anything, say anything, make up his own laws and beat up on anybody, anywhere anyhow. The rigged system was ripe to be high jacked.

  And the Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton with all her qualification is sounding too much like a politician even when echoing Sanders agenda. Her agenda is eventual slow change meant to sound realistic but sounding like another political excuse for why what is needed can’t be done. Yes, but not just yet is. 

And voters listen to Bernie hammering away at a rigged economy, a rigged criminal system, a system in which the wealth produced by workers goes to a tiny percentage of the elite. And college is either unaffordable or saddling those who do graduate with life -long financial burdens. And when he says it will take a revolution to get our priorities straight, it is the young idealists who believe in his fair and democratic ideals who say enough of two party politics, enough of favoring the rich and powerful.

The two party system is no longer viable. There are no longer any regular republicans who can rely on loyal followers to vote for their official candidates nationally. And their traditional supporters will not vote for Trump. On the Democratic side, if Hillary is nominated she will win by default but if she wants a friendly house and congress she will need not only to mouth commitment to Saunders issues. There have to be local and congressional candidates to earn the support of the revolution he has called for.

 The two party system benefits multinational corporations and wall street. And they will use their media to marginalize, malign, corrupt and control any movement that threatens their power.

America once did have a realignment of our parties that was between a slave based economy in the south and an industrial economy in the North in which half of the states rejected the results of an election and the rule of Washington.

Could our tradition of constitutional law survive if our evil alter ego rejects an election result? A lot depends on how the greed of the powerful corporations prevails  or  our democratic traditons are strong enough to overcome.

Perhaps the best result of the current situation would be a realistic realignment of the party system. What could emerge is something perhaps like Canadian parties which stand for specific platforms that truly are right wing, centrist, or left wing and which give minority parties more participation on national and local politics. Canadians regularly turn out ruling parties from office.

In any case the Red/blue two party system is done.

 Perhaps we will have four parties to represent what are our current blocks:
The Know Nothing Party of the anti government right.
The Greed party that belives in government for the rich and powerful
The Moderates Who want good government without much change
And the New Democrats who see socialism as needed to solve social problems

3/5/16
A note to the very frustrated Republicans on the hi-jackng of their party by Donald Trump.
Item 1
 You made the receptive audience he now commands:
For years you've been hiding your real agenda by framing it as something quite different.
Your real agenda is to cut taxes on the ultra rich and reduce regulation that restricts profit centered practices. You avoid any tax at all while closingout american jobs by takintake production overseas and shelter yourprofits in untaxable foreign accounts
While opposing every initiative of the President you created a mythical enemy called Washington which is somehow different then the Congress you control.
You justified below poverty wage minimums and taking aaway the social protections of the New Deal as unafforable but wrote your pork barrel into  totally unrelated bills
And you frame federal spending as somehow  bad for the working and middle class.

So there is an elctorate out there who responds to the Pey-eyed Piper who points out that you are Washington and that you are not living by beliefs you never intended to live by.

Item 2
Has it never occured to you as the sponsor of the Republican Presidential debate to set rules of decorum and common decency? Could you not have easily said that obscene language and attacks on gender, physical bodily characterists, ad hominen attacks on other candidiates or interviewers as well as uncontitutioinal proposals were not permitted and that candidtes who crossed the line would a. have their mikes cut off and b. be barred from further participation in the further debates.

Item 3
You also created an audience for Bernie Sanders.by your tactics of  buying off politicians and your flagrant disregard of the common good in your economic policies and your abandonment of the role of Congress to protect citizens from unfair bussiness practices and your treatment of our first black president with total disrespect, You have created education policies that have destroyed local control in major cities and you restricted funding only to schools that restrict the ability of teachers to use their profesional knowlledge. Five year olds are in sweat shop kindergartens with no play  and age inappropriate  methods.You ignored the rising costsof higher education and the fact that graduates are weighed dowm for lifein dwbt they can not even end with bankrupcy.
Can you wonder that our youth find truth in Bernie Sanders platform. And the word socilaism no longer frightens them.  And his candidicy has pushed Hillary CLinton much farther to the left in her campaign. You made that happen too .

It may be that the one good  thing to come out of this election is                           a political reallignment with voters getting some chance to understand who cares about them and who doesn't. Maybe we will end up with a conservative party, a tea party, a democratic socialist party. and a liberal party.

Why the attempt to make reading simple? A reply to Learning to Read: Should We Keep Things Simple?

In the latest issue of the Reading Research Quarterly the lead article reports an attempt- one of many- to test Phil Gough’s “Simple View”  to make reading simple so it could be studied simplistically.

I’ve written Linda Gambrell and Susan Neuman , current editors, to raise some of the issues.

Psychological researchers in reading have a long tradition of avoiding the simple fact that reading is language. Mainly that’s because they have not wanted to take the time to learn some basic linguistics. But it’s also because the most importance aspects of language- are not amenable to use of the experimental method they have locked themselves into. You cannot permit one aspect of language   to vary (the variable) while holding the rest invariant. Language is a dynamic process that works so well because it is so flexible- changing, ambiguous and redundant.

Gough believed reading ability could be reduced to two factors: word recognition and listening comprehension. The authors of the RRQ study as have most of those trying to make reading simple know that’s not enough so they through a few more tests in the statistical meat grinder which make his formula a little (or a lot ) less simple. But all that does is make the absurdity of the quest for simplicity a bit less obviously a failure.

What makes this whole attempt to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse so absurd is that it isn’t necessary. Language is easy to learn regardless of its complexity. Virtually all kids are using one or more languages successfully by age three with no instruction. And three year old digital natives are learning as easily to read and write as they happily text each other.

Here’s my letter:

To the Editors

Susan B. Neuman

Linda Gambrell

Reading Research Quarterly

Dear editors:

For a few minutes when I started to read the lead article Learning to Read: Should We Keep Things Simple? in the current issue of the Reading Research Quarterly I thought they were reprinting a piece that had been published in 1965. It certainly would have fit right in with the main stream research of the time although my first research article, “Cues and Miscues in Oral Reading” was published that year which showed that even first graders could read most of the words in the context of a story that they couldn’t read from a list. And there is nothing simple about that.

Given what  has been learned about reading in the half century since 1965, I would have thought that correlating scores on a WHOLE BUNCH OF TESTS to test whether a simplistic -excuse me simple view- of reading was useful or not would not have been considered publishable in RRQ.  I also found it curious that the authors say that the simple view is word recognition and listening comprehension but their introduction to the issue the editors call these two – what factors/skills/ aspects/ measurable parts?- decoding and  language comprehension as if these were equivalent terms.  None of the tests used in the article were claimed to measure such factors. Isn’t reading comprehension language comprehension. If so then aren’t they correlating language comprehension with language comprehension. If not, are they saying that reading is not language?

The authors used a lot of tests- a lot of tests. But are the tests testing what they claim to test?  Are they equally valid for all subjects? Do they have floor and ceiling effects? Are the scores normative or ipsative? In effect isn’t this a case of GIGO –garbage in garbage out?

And should we accept the conclusions that elaborating on the two factors making them less simple would make the simple view more useful? What would that mean? If scores improve on the tests that measure the simple view will children learn to read?

Or let’s ask the most important question: by treating learning to read as something simple have we made it simple?

In the last 50 years we’ve learned two facts about learning language (including reading) that may surprise the authors and the editors. One is that language isn’t at all simple in fact it’s so complicated no linguist has a complete system for describing, let alone explaining, language. But fact two: language is easy to learn:  almost all children by age 3 have gained functional use of language without instruction. Many third world children have learned several languages just as easily.

There’s no way to make language learning simple. But there is an easy way to help children to learn to read. It is to make the way they found it easy to learn oral language work for them in learning to make sense of written language.  Written language is learned just as oral language is learned- in the process if using it.

Six editions of Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading (ILA/IRA) have presented more enlightened views of how reading works – and how it is learned- than this simple minded article.  And teachers know better that reading is neither simple nor hard to learn except when it’s turned into abstractions on silly tests that have nothing to do with making sense of print.

Ken Goodman

Whole Language: Victory Laps

Yetta and I, in recent months, have visited three quite different places where whole language has been going for some time with quite amazing results.

The first was Zaharis School in Mesa Arizona. In a remote part of a very conservative school district Mike  Oliver, the principal has been grooming a faculty over time to apply principles of whole language and make heavy use of literature. When I asked a teacher of second graders, “Are there any non-readers?” She responded, “You of all people should know better than to ask that!” The school serves an important “safety valve function for the district” It keeps a group of parents, who would not be happy with skill oriented instruction, happy. They love the excitement of their children in their rich school experiences. Parents drive their kids miles to attend and the school has a waiting list.

Then shortly later Yetta spoke at the 10^th biennial conference of the Guatemalan Reading Conference in Quetzletenango (Xelay) Guatemala. She heard report after report of application of whole language in situations the polar opposite of Mesa. Children of rock crushers and children whose families scavenge the city dumps are enjoying whole language education. Through the work of Steve Barrett, Marcia Mondschein and many others, courageous teachers are developing their own whole language experiences and bringing literacy to many who would not have had access to literacy.                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Then again we had the privilege of visiting the preschool and elementary school at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan. Dr. Ruth Saes Vega has been promoting whole language in the school and has just published a book in Spanish entirely by whole language teachers writing about their classrooms. And a new generation of teachers were joyously implementing the concepts of great teaching the book represented. Ruthie also has been taking grad students to a small Mayan village school in Guatemala to work with teachers and kids there. Those teachers presented about their whole language at the Guatemalan conference.

For Yetta and me each situation felt like a victory lap. That’s what the winner of a race does after crossing the finish line. In each case we were being congratulated for what courageous teachers have been achieving as they turn concepts and ideas into reality for children.

We felt like shouting, “Viva Lenguaje Integral”, “Long live Whole Language”. May literacy flourish and may children everywhere, one day, find such enlightened teachers in their schools.