Public Schools: New Start in Chicago

No big U.S. city has a school superintendent quite as embattled, aloof and well paid—$48,500 a year* as Chicago's Benjamin C. Willis, 64. An aggressive administrator justly proud of the fact that in 13 years he has added 280 new school buildings to the Chicago system and taken all of its 580,000 students off double sessions for the first time in this century, Willis by his highhandedness has gradually earned the disapproval of most of Chicago. Last week, as Willis' durable defender, the Chicago Tribune, turned against him, the school board named his successor.

Chicago's school problems are immense enough to make any superintendent unpopular. The system is short of money, requires 1,700 new teachers each year simply as replacements, needs still more buildings, has an influx of Southern Negroes and an outgo of suburban-bound whites that has pushed the nonwhite proportion of students up to 52% and makes meaningful integration difficult. Yet Willis has vastly aggravated his problems by arrogantly dismissing all criticism, stifling staff initiative, and running the system as a one-man show.

School-Board Clash. Willis tried to deal with rising racial tensions by inaction and silence. When civil rights groups charged that neighborhood-school lines were drawn to crowd Negro kids into segregated schools while nearby white neighborhoods had schools with unused classrooms, Willis long refused to produce any racial census or classroom statistics. When he ordered mobile classrooms, which his critics dubbed "Willis wagons," into a Negro neighborhood, his school board overruled him, adopted a plan of more liberal student transfers instead. Willis refused to carry it out, suddenly turned in his resignation in October 1963.

That dramatic move marshaled Willis' last show of significant support. A committee of business and civic leaders asked him to reconsider, and the school board persuaded him to stay. Civil rights groups only increased their pressure: 225,000 students stayed out of school in one boycott. The school board tired of Willis last summer, informally voted 7 to 4 not to renew his contract, compromised on his guarantee to quit when he reaches 65 next December. Willis faced not only a hostile board but also 48 top Chicago businessmen—including Inland Steel's Joseph L. Block, Foote, Cone & Belding's Fairfax Cone, and Chicago & North Western's Ben Heineman—who last July urged selection of a new man and a policy of "equal access to our schools by all races."

The new man will be James Francis Redmond, 51, who now heads a peaceful school district of 9,000 students in Syosset on Long Island's North Shore. Syosset's affluent residents have been willing to help pay $1,220 per student in taxes, give Redmond a salary of $32,500, and devote much time to community committees that he has set up to consult on school problems. "I don't believe that school decisions should be left to the professionals," he says.

Job to Do. Redmond earlier taught in and helped administer Kansas City schools, served as assistant superintendent and then purchasing director for the Chicago schools from 1948 to 1953. He is proudest of his 1953-61 term as superintendent of the New Orleans schools, where he coolly withstood pressures and insisted that school integration begin.