Education: Big City Schoolmaster

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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.