The Education of Big Ben

At a meeting in Baltimore this month, top school officials from Northern cities gathered to talk over a grave and insistent problem: mounting Negro pressure against de facto school segregation. Conspicuously absent was a big-city educator who is acutely beset with segregation difficulties--Chicago's School Superintendent Benjamin C. Willis.

It was characteristic of Willis to fail to attend the meeting. "Big Ben" Willis, 61, has long been accustomed to going his own way. That is why he is in trouble.

Separate & Unequal. Willis is the U.S.'s highest-paid public school official. His $48,500 salary, indeed, ranks him fourth among all U.S. public officials, after President Kennedy, Governor Rockefeller and New York's Mayor Wagner. Willis is also an exceedingly able administrator who oversees 552,000 pupils, 22,000 teachers and a $300 million annual budget with brisk efficiency. During his ten years in his post, he has recruited 6,000 additional teachers, nearly doubled the salary scale, added enough classrooms to trim the average class from 39 pupils to 32, and eliminated all double-shift instruction despite a school-age population explosion. He has planned and overseen a $250 million building program, completed without a single major scandal.

Yet Willis finds himself assailed by criticisms. He is, critics charge, an egotist massively convinced of his own Tightness, stonily resistant to other people's ideas. He bristles at any questioning of his administration. Wags say that he has revised Chicago's motto, "I Will," to "I, Willis."

The most vehement charge leveled against Willis is that he is stubbornly unresponsive to Chicago Negroes' demands for desegregation of the public schools. In Chicago, even more than in most U.S. cities, whites and Negroes live apart, in separate neighborhoods. That has been the pattern for generations. Since each child attends the school in his own neighborhood, most Chicago public schools are either predominantly white or predominantly Negro. About 90% of the city's Negro elementary school pupils attend schools that are virtually all-Negro. And Negroes charge that for Negro children, education is not only separate but unequal. A survey by Chicago's Urban League found that in Negro schools the budget for teacher salaries is only 85% as high as in white schools, and that operating expenses per pupil are only 66% as high.

Willis meets the Negroes' complaints with what a federal judge last year labeled "benign indifference." Confronted with Negro demands for a loosening of the neighborhood-school pattern, Willis put forward a token transfer plan under which a total of only 32 children switched to other schools. Willis argues that he is not interested in maintaining segregation but only in preserving the concept of the neighborhood school. "I'm an educator, not a social worker," he says. "I don't go around counting Negroes, Indians, Hindus or any other group." When a delegation of N.A.A.C.P. leaders from New England states tried to interview him, Willis met their questions with blunt negativism:

Q. Do you believe that de facto segregation does exist?

A. I refuse to answer that question.

Q. Will you make a statement of your own philosophy on segregation in public schools?

A. I shall make no such statement.

Wheeled Classrooms. Two weeks ago impatience with Willis pushed Chicago Negroes to violence. From sit-ins at the school board headquarters, demonstrators went on to lie-downs in front of "Willis Wagons," mobile classrooms that are sent into neighborhoods with crowded schools. Negroes regard the wheeled classrooms as devices for maintaining segregation. Police arrested 56 demonstrators. Brick-throwing teenagers injured several cops. Hotheads lofted a molotov cocktail at one Willis Wagon, set fire to another.

Last week the school board took under consideration a proposal to bring in a panel of outside educators to draw up a plan for eliminating segregation in the city's schools. Willis has already begun to yield.

Pressured by the school board, he has agreed to broaden his transfer plan. By a vote of 10 to 1, the school board has directed him to take a racial census of the schools, a step that he had previously resisted. Acting under a new state law, the board plans to redraw school district boundaries to speed integration. Says one board member: "I believe that Willis intends to carry out these proposals. I'm counting on it. He will either carry them out or leave. That's been made clear."

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