Patrick Groff
(1924-2014)
Patrick Groff earned a Ph.D. in UC Berkeley's Public Education program in 1955. He joined UC San Diego's Department of Education in the same year.
Until his retirement in 1985, Groff published over 300 papers and nine books on literacy education. In 1995, the National Right to Read Foundation gave Groff their National Teacher of the Year award.
1955 was the year of publication of Rudolf Flesch's bombshell book Why Johnny Can't Read, And What you Can Do About It. Groff became a principal defender of direct instruction in ("synthetic") phonics for the rest of his life.
The bulk of Groff's writing was severely critical of the whole language movement and its predecessor, the word or look/say method.
A seminal contribution was Groff's critical analysis of the Phonics Institute at Ohio State University in 1998 in which all speakers but one were opposed to direct instruction in phonics.
