Big City Schoolmaster

Under sharpest attack on the Northern segregation front last week was Chicago's General Superintendent of Schools Benjamin C. Willis. Negroes charge that Chicago's school boundaries are "manipulated to perpetuate segregated schools." When 107 Negro children sought transfers to predominantly white schools, Willis refused to grant them. Willis stands by the neighborhood school tradition as right and good: "They can go to school wherever they live." He says that he does not even know the racial complexion of Chicago schools; no such records are kept because "we treat children as children."

Sincere or evasive, that attitude may plunge Chicago into a battle that Northerners would have thought only Southerners cared to fight. It would not be the first scrap for Ben Willis, 59, who runs the nation's third-biggest school system: 462 schools with 492,862 students, plus two teachers' colleges and a junior college with six branches, a staff of 19,000, and a yearly budget of $286 million. As president of the American Association of School Administrators, Willis embodies all the trials and triumphs of a job that spans politics as much as education.

"Determined Defender." Ben Willis is perhaps best known for his whopping salary: $48,500 a year. It makes him the nation's third-highest-paid public official, after President Kennedy ($100,000) and New York's Governor Rockefeller ($50,000). But not for nothing has Chicago's penny-wise school board just handed him a new four-year contract. In eight years of 65-hour weeks, Willis has carved a record that recently got him top mention as the logical overhauler of scandal-ridden schools in New York City (TIME, Aug. 25). Awarding him an honorary degree last year, Harvard warmly praised Willis as "a determined defender of the proposition that American cities deserve good schools."

Willis grew up on a Maryland farm, attended a one-room school. He worked his way through George Washington University as an auto salesman, usher and hotel clerk, rose from country school teacher to superintendent of schools in Yonkers and Buffalo, N.Y. In 1953 Willis replaced Harvard-bound Herold Hunt, the man hired to clean up the political mess that disgraced Chicago schools under the late Mayor Ed Kelly. Willis clinched Hunt's reforms and followed with his own equally decisive ones.

"Everything Good." Willis decentralized Chicago's entire system into 20 separate districts (each with a population of 250,000) that could match suburbs for academic flexibility. He built 94 new schools and 92 new additions in a construction program that has yet to be tainted with scandal; the cost of building has even dropped 17%. Last week, along with 13 new schools, Chicago opened its second teachers' college, a $6,000,000 edifice that looks like a big beehive. Willis can now train at home nearly half the 1,500 new teachers he needs every year. Because of Willis, teachers can look forward to a maximum salary of $10,000 as against $5,700 when he arrived. The student-teacher ratio has dropped from 39 to 33. Almost everything that U.S. educators hail as new and different is quietly under way in Chicago. Long before Sputnik, Willis began beefing up his curriculum, launched programs for gifted students. He got $500,000 from the Ford Foundation to start junior college TV courses, another $468,500 to tackle the school dropout problem. He has abolished grades-by-age in several elementary schools; this summer he had a 50-man team evaluating 10,000 textbooks and teaching aids for possible use.

Going for Willis is a politically clean school board, which is free to write its own budget without sabotage by the city council. Also going for him is his own Spartan selfdiscipline, which often keeps him working until 3 a.m. His speeches run to cliches; his critics label his community relations as "deplorable." But School Superintendent Willis makes good on his promises, and what he promises is to produce "more buildings, more classrooms, more attention to adult and vocational education, to the highly motivated and the handicapped--more of everything that's good."

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