Friday, Nov. 02, 1962
Big Job, Big Man
In U.S. public schools these days, rich suburbs run lively experiments while big cities run hard to stand still. One happy exception is Pittsburgh, where in four years School Superintendent Calvin E. Gross, 43, has sent a freshet of ideas throughout the schools. Last week that record got Gross a new job: boss of New York City schools, the biggest public school system in the U.S.
New York's outgoing (and scandal-tainted) School Superintendent John J. Theobald leaves a witches' brew--860 schools starved for money and choked in red tape, 40,000 teachers newly unionized and still restless after a recent strike, 1,023,875 pupils, of whom one-third come from "culturally deprived homes." This plight moved New York to look beyond the Hudson and its own inbred school administration for the best qualified superintendent in the U.S. After scouring 56 major cities for four months, the searchers, led by Dean Francis Keppel of Harvard's Graduate School of Education, solidly recommended Gross.
A native of Los Angeles, Gross has a Phi Beta Kappa key, a Harvard doctorate and a quick mind of the math-and-music kind. His math won him honors at U.C.L.A. ('40), got him a teaching job at Oregon State College before he became a wartime Army captain. His music made him an accomplished violinist, and for years a member of symphony orchestras in Southern California. He was an upstate New York school superintendent when Pittsburgh found him.
His key accomplishment in Pittsburgh has been luring better teachers at better pay, devising better ways to free them for better teaching. As a result, Pittsburgh boasts the nation's biggest team-teaching effort (8,500 pupils), a solid start in Advanced Placement courses, "lay-reader" housewives who grade English compositions, a 25% higher salary for beginning teachers, and a 10% merit bonus for master teachers. Last year applications for teaching in Pittsburgh schools rose 65%. A skilled lobbyist, Gross quietly wrested $1,500,000 from experiment-minded foundations, got the state legislature to pass a i% wage tax for Pittsburgh schools. Gross calls himself "a three-R man," says: "I'd rather see eight hours of English than eight hours of driver education." More than a whopping $40,000 salary has lured him to New York. "The battle for better education will be won or lost in the big cities," he says, and New York offers ample chance to prove it.
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