New York's Take-Charge Man

The nation's biggest school system has a new chief who is the boss by virtue of having taken vigorous charge of the job. New York City, disappointed in two recent experiences with superintendents hired from outside the system, turned six weeks ago to one of its own, making Bernard Eugene Donovan,* 54, acting superintendent. The schools thus got a stocky, ambitious Irishman who is not only a creature of the system but who loves it. "I've been in it for 35 years and I feel a certain affinity for it," he says. "I see great things that can be done with it."

Donovan succeeds Calvin Gross, who two years ago was lured to New York from Pittsburgh after earning a reputation for creative educational innovation there. But in New York, Gross never learned the knobs and levers of the system, and thus proved unable to formulate or push ideas fast enough to satisfy the board. Now on three-month terminal leave, he still turns up daily at his office to mull over personal matters and help his lawyers fight for a hefty severance settlement.

"He Grows on Me." Since taking over, Donovan has been all action, going to Albany and Washington to plead for state and federal funds, plugging integration plans on television, meeting at least twice weekly with the 'board. He snaps out decisions. One system administrator says: "Donovan grows on me. I ask him a question and I get an answer. I may not like it, but I get it, and I'm not used to that."

Donovan's success is likely to turn in the end on the quality of his answers. He does not have a reputation for creativity, but he is plugging a plan for decentralizing the system's administrative maze so that individual school administrators can get faster answers too. On the crucial problem of meshing integration and better schooling, he is committed to a plan that centers on creating four-year middle schools (fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grades) that will draw students from broader areas, cross neighborhood racial lines. "We need a new approach to teaching where different backgrounds and races begin to intermingle," says Donovan.

"Smile." Donovan has a more outgoing personality to sell such ideas than had Gross. Hissed by the city's ever-outraged pressure groups, he has remained cool. He is a persuasive, fact-conscious speaker. His tenor delivery of Galway Bay at public dinners sets Irish eyes to smiling; his show tunes at bar mitzvahs please Jewish friends. A joiner, he is an American Legionnaire, an executive board member of the National Council of Catholic Men, and a member of Citizens for Decent Literature. A sign on his desk reads:

SMILE -- GOD LOVES YOU.

*No relation to School Board President James B. Donovan.

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