Chicago's mammoth public school system hires 13,000 teachers, educates 460,000 pupils at a yearly cost of $71,000,000. Few U. S. educators, however, feel any strong urge to rule it. Peppery, fox-bearded Superintendent William McAndrew (1924-28), born in Ypsilanti, Mich., was constantly bedeviled as a "stool pigeon of King George" by Mayor William Hale ("Big Bill'') Thompson's "America First" campaign. His successor, William Joseph Bogan (1928-36), spent most of his term in the morass of teachers' "payless paydays." Last week Chicago's Board of Education, looking for a successor to Superintendent Bogan, who died in March, chose his assistant, William Harding Johnson, 41.
Blue-eyed, genial William Johnson is the first native Chicagoan to become superintendent since the post was created in 1854. Son of a Danish grocer, he swept high-school classrooms, did odd jobs, saved enough money to go to Beloit College where, as an assistant in the chemistry laboratory, he "mixed the drinks for the boys to analyze." Switching to Northwestern, he studied education, had a rapid succession of jobs that landed him in Chicago as an elementary-school principal. When he asked for a high-school principalship last year, the Board of Education made him assistant superintendent.
Taking over his new duties last week, Superintendent Johnson got a shiny official Cadillac, an office filled with roses and snapdragons, a stern ultimatum from potent North Central Association of Colleges & Secondary Schools. Unless, the Association intimated, Chicago took prompt steps to enlarge its high-school teaching staff, North Central would remove understaffed Chicago schools from its accredited list, make their graduates take examinations to enter the Association's member colleges.