Stink in Chicago

Chicagoans have learned to put up with many a civic stench, but by September, 1944, some of them could no longer stand the smell of their public-school administration. They called on the National Education Association, lumbering but potent watchdog representing some 900,000 U.S. teachers, to investigate. But when N.E.A.'s investigators appeared, they were brusquely told to devote themselves instead "to making some contribution to the war and defense effort." For the first time anywhere, N.E.A. was barred from public school records and classes.

N.E.A. went ahead with its investigation as best it might, last week reported its findings. Although closed doors still hid most of the evidence, the investigators had learned enough to compile the most damning report in N.E.A.'s 75-year history.

Teachers Overruled. Chicago's school system began to go wrong, charged N.E.A., soon after James B. McCahey, a coal dealer and cog in Mayor Ed Kelly's machine, was named president of the school board in 1933. It got worse after McCahey appointed William H. Johnson to be superintendent in 1936. McCahey and Johnson went to work first on Chicago Teachers College, a public school adjunct which has a monopoly on the training of all the city's elementary teachers.

In 1936, the pair demoted able, honest Butler Laughlin from the presidency of the college to a high-school job because, the report said, he could not be "controlled" and once refused to falsify a student's grades at McCahey's request. Soon McCahey and Johnson began influencing grades without reference to teachers, wangling admissions for incompetent applicants, giving teaching jobs to friends. A city councilman's daughter who had been asked by her teachers to leave was awarded a teaching certificate after flunking 15 hours of class work.

In August 1943, N.E.A. said, 21 members of the college faculty were summarily fired and 21 others demoted. One of the latter was Raymond M. Cook, a veteran of 20 years of teaching and school administration in Chicago. Turned down for a principal's certificate six years earlier because he was "disloyal," Cook this time was transferred to a third grade post at $1,500 cut in salary. Last year he quit to go to work in a war plant.

Spies & Terror. In the lower schools, the report found the McCahey-Johnson control even tighter. Superintendent Johnson, whose back porch was dynamited last autumn (TIME, Oct. 2), was reported to have boasted of his spy system and its 24-hour service.

In 1942, N.E.A. charged, he again demoted Butler Laughlin to make room for one of McCahey's relatives. On less than a day's notice, he pushed competent Mrs. Olive P. Bruner out of the top job in a school for crippled children, replaced her with the sister of a Federal judge. In one 75-day period last fall, Johnson transferred over 600 teachers, in many cases as punishment or to make room for friends.

The Payoff. According to N.E.A. evidence, pasty-faced Superintendent Johnson first cashed in on this sort of finagling by his scandalous handling of a principals' qualifying examination in 1937. By changing the requirements one week before the examination, he got top grades for candidates he had tutored at a lucrative fee. During his tenure, the school board has purchased 23 textbooks on which his name appears as author or coauthor. N.E.A. further strongly suspects that there are many things amiss in the handling of the $70,000,000 annual school budget.

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