Inside Man

For ten months New York City had been looking for a superintendent of schools. It was a prize job, the best-paid public school administrative post in the U.S.: $25,000 a year. The Board of Education declared itself ready to "shatter precedent in its effort to find the best man, regardless of geographic location or rank in service," to replace Superintendent John E. Wade, who must retire at 70 this summer.

Last week, to no one's surprise but to a few people's wrath, the board found the "best man" in its own backyard--just two doors down from Wade's office. The choice shattered no precedents. The new superintendent: faithful, 59-year-old William Jansen, Wade's right-hand man in the formidable corps of 41 associate and assistant superintendents.

It was not a unanimous choice: he had won by a bare 4-to-3 vote over highly touted Willard E. Goslin, superintendent of the Minneapolis schools, whose main handicap was being an outlander. In two years at Minneapolis, drawling, down-to-earth Willard Goslin had won higher pay for teachers, opened new schools, overhauled the study program, been voted Citizen No. 2 (after Sister Kenny), and attracted national attention. The pro-Goslin New York Herald Tribune, "depressed and disheartened" by Jansen's appointment as superintendent, called it the choice "of the man next in line, the insider who knows the ropes and knows the folks and knows how much easier it is to let things be. . . ."

Dese, Dose & Firetraps. Dr. Jansen, as head, of the nation's biggest public school system (800 schools, 34,000 teachers, 890,000 pupils) will have one of education's most thankless jobs. There are fine things about the New York system (including excellent technical high schools, special classes for handicapped youngsters). But most parents who can afford it send their kids to private schools, and many others wish they could find the money.

Some of the reasons: New York public schools are overcrowded (in one last fall, children had to squat on tin pails and fruit baskets for lack of chairs, and every day, because of the teacher shortage, hundreds of classes go "uncovered." i.e., teacherless). Many schools are shy of up-to-date textbooks. A $38,000,000 building program is still largely in the blueprint stage, and schoolhouses are dangerously decrepit (said Mayor William O'Dwyer: "Those old Civil War firetraps are ghastly"). Above all, parents don't want their boys & girls to pick up the "dese-&-dose" accent of many students, or the morals and manners of "Dead End Kids" who are often the leaders in some of the city's schools.

Slow & Steady. The new superintendent shrugged off questions about changes in the school system until he took office ("I wouldn't want to make Superintendent Wade's job any tougher than it is") and promised only: "I shall say little and think much." Genial, big (6 ft. 3 in., 215 Ibs.) Bill Jansen is a man never described as brilliant, usually described as persevering. He is proud of his 39-year slow climb in the school system, his 31 years of Boy Scouting (he has the Silver Beaver for distinguished service) and his 53 years of attending the same Lutheran church. On his steady way up from substitute teacher to superintendent, he married the fifth-grade teacher at a school where he was principal (they have one son, now at Princeton).

Two days after his election, Jansen had a taste of trouble to come, when 8,000 teachers demonstrated in front of the system's Livingston Street headquarters. They protested the proposed new $175,000,000 school budget (an alltime high, but too skimpy in its salary provisions to please the teachers). The new superintendent will also have to face the demands of 4,000 regular teachers, frozen by budget provisions into "substitute" status at an inadequate $1,800 a year. Bill Jansen will indeed be called on to think much.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.