Whitsitt Ruel 'Dub' Goodson: A Legacy in Education and Accreditation (1912–1986)

Whitsitt Ruel “Dub” Goodson, educator, school superintendent, and national and international leader in school accreditation and curriculum, was born on March 3, 1912, in Copperas Cove, Coryell County, Texas. He was the son of Jasper Hicks (or Hix) Goodson and Lena May (Whitsitt) Goodson. He grew up in Copperas Cove, where his father worked as a barber. He attended Copperas Cove High School and graduated in 1929. Upon graduation he enrolled in Baylor University where he worked on the student newspaper. He also took courses at the University of Texas at Austin in 1930 and 1931. The Great Depression forced him to return to Copperas Cove and assist his grandfathers, Eli R. Goodson and Thaddeus A. Whitsitt, in running their businesses. W. R. Goodson married Juanita Mabel Sink on October 25, 1933. They had two children—Donald Whitsitt and Elaine. They attended Protestant churches.

During the 1930s the federal Works Progress Administration (later known as the Work Projects Administration) built a two-classroom school house at Hubbard in an unsettled rural portion of Coryell County. In 1937 Goodson began his teaching career in this rural school. In the summers, beginning in 1938, Goodson and his family traveled to San Marcos where he attended Southwest Texas State Teachers College (present-day Texas State University). This additional training led to his hiring as principal of the public school in McMahan, Texas, in Caldwell County. Continuing to attend Southwest Texas State in the summers, in 1942 he received his B.S. degree in history and government and was the honor graduate in his class as well as a member of Pi Gamma Mu and Alpha Chi. He received his master of arts degree from the same institution in 1946.

In 1942, when the United States Army took over most of Coryell County for the construction of military facilities during World War II, the superintendent and some of the teachers in Copperas Cove took jobs with the army at Camp Hood (now Fort Cavazos). W. R. Goodson was recruited for the job of superintendent (which included principal, teacher, librarian, football coach, and sometimes janitor) of the Copperas Cove schools. He served as president of the Coryell County Teachers Association in 1945. That same year he was mayor of Copperas Cove at a time when the community’s sewage system began instillation. He was president of the local Lions Club in 1946. 

Goodson also continued his education by enrolling in extension courses in the education department of the University of Texas at Austin, where he completed the required coursework for his Ed.D. in educational administration. In 1949 while writing his doctoral dissertation, he held a position as assistant professor of education as Southwest Texas State Teachers College. He eventually completed his doctorate in 1952.

In 1950 Goodson was offered a position with the Texas Education Agency (TEA) in Austin. That same year the agency began to implement the Gilmer-Aikin Laws that included major changes in education in Texas and how Texas funded public schools. Accredited school districts would receive funds from the state, and their graduates could enter state-supported colleges and universities without having to take an entry examination. Goodson and several others in the TEA traveled across the state to set up accreditation committees at high schools, and they publicized this new approach to state education funding through the major newspapers of Texas. From 1950 to 1954 Goodson directed the development of the school accreditation program in Texas.

The Gilmer-Aikin Laws became widely known outside of Texas. An owner of a privately-owned American-style school in Monterrey, Mexico, approached TEA and noted that this legislation did not state that such an accredited school must be located in Texas. Consequently, he applied for accreditation because many of his high school graduates went on to colleges in Texas. The Texas attorney general eventually stated that schools outside of Texas could be accredited, but they would be required to pay for all accreditation expenses.  Having learned some Spanish in high school, Goodson accepted the lead in accrediting this American-style high school in Monterrey.

After that accreditation, many similar American-style schools in Mexico and Central America applied to Texas for accreditation. Consequently, in 1953 TEA appointed Goodson as chairman of the Texas Committee to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) in Atlanta, Georgia. Since in the 1890s SACS had a history of working with schools south of the border. Goodson worked with others involved with schools abroad and several organizations within the United States that had interest in these American-style schools abroad. In 1959 Texas appointed Goodson as its representative to the Inter-American Schools Service Committee of the American Council of Education. Following World War II there was increased interest in American-style school accreditation because of the many families of American diplomats and U.S. corporations who had school age children who hoped to attend colleges in the United States. Goodson, along with Raymond Wilson of SACS and Horace Dean of the University of Florida, became aware of these various organizations and the fact that the U.S. Department of State interacted with foreign and domestic schools through three uncoordinated agencies.  In the late 1950s the men went to Washington, D.C., on several occasions to work with their congressmen and senators to pass legislation to set up a subdepartment in the State Department to work with overseas American schools. Texas senator Ralph Yarborough strongly supported that effort as did Senator Lyndon Johnson. Late in the Dwight Eisenhower administration the U.S. Congress passed legislation to create the Department of Overseas Schools within the U.S. State Department; the department officially began during the Kennedy administration. In 1963 Ernest N. Mannino was appointed the director of the Office of American Overseas Schools and began to interact with many domestic and foreign organizations. Mannino soon met Goodson and, appreciating Goodson’s long experience with American schools abroad, worked closely with him for many years.

When the U.S. Congress passed the funded education legislation in 1967, Goodson, still with TEA, was appointed as one of its project directors. Goodson chaired several committees with SACS during his tenure at the TEA, and he worked on a number of TEA special projects, including chairing the writing committee that developed the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools booklet Improving International Understanding Through Education (1962), directing eleven curriculum commissions for Texas (1959–62), and supervising the development of a “Stay-in-School” project for children of migrant parents (1964–65). In 1966 he took part in a panel in Washington, D.C., at the first National Foreign Policy Conference for Educators.

In 1968 Goodson resigned from TEA and began working with SACS in Atlanta. In 1970 he assumed the role of executive secretary of the SACS Commission on Secondary Schools. Through the U.S. State Department and the Association for the Advancement of International Education (AAIA) and financial support by the Ford Foundation, Goodson traveled to every country in North America and South America as well as three trips to Great Britain. Two trips to Europe included visits to American-style schools in Spain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Greece, and Italy on the European continent. In December 1976 Goodson received an “In Appreciation” plaque from the U.S. State Department for his “many years of dynamic leadership in the American educational community” and as an “invaluable resource to the Office of Overseas Schools.”

Goodson worked in Atlanta until 1977 when he retired and moved back to Texas. After his retirement he became the executive director of the Texas Committee of the Commission of Secondary Schools. He also remained a consultant for the State Department Office of Overseas Schools and helped in Brazil, Mexico City, and Costa Rica. He served on the board of the American School of Correspondence in Chicago.

Whitsitt Ruel “Dub” Goodson died in Austin, Texas, on November 8, 1986. He was survived by his wife and two children. His ashes were buried in the family plot in Copperas Cove Cemetery. He was inducted posthumously into the AAIE Hall of Fame in 1991. The American School in Chicago established a memorial scholarship in his name. The Association of American Schools of Central America, Colombia, Carribean and Mexico (known as the Tri-Association) named the keynote address at its annual educators’ conference in Goodson’s honor “for his tireless efforts to improved education throughout the world.”