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Banished Board. The manufacturer of red tape in New York is "Livingston Street," or board of education headquarters in Brooklyn. Prolific with ideas for curriculum reform, it seems incapable of getting them into the schools. Years of big talk and tiny testing go into "pilot" studies and "demonstration" projects as generations of children pass by. For example, HQ has spent 17 years "developing" a new elementary math curriculum that is still not finished.
As petty as it is provincial, Livingston Street has long required teachers to punch time clocks, toil at trivial paper work and use rigid "lesson plans" that often ignore student needs. Many vital problems never reach HQ. To rouse the place on the telephone can take 40 rings. A commercial high school wired for DC gets new electric typewriters wired for AC. Just to get one home economics room equipped at George Washington High School took Principal Henry Hillson nine years. The rapid rise of the city's teachers' union is due almost entirely to the frustration they experience trying to squawk into Livingston Street's tin ear.
The court of last resort—when things get bad enough—is the New York State board of regents, who enforce the state's three dense tomes of education law. In 1961, Livingston Street got all three volumes thrown at it. Aghast at school construction scandals, the state ousted the entire New York City board of education. Out went Superintendent John J. Theobald, under fire for using a vocational school to build him a pleasure boat in someone else's name. In came a new, lively, politically sanitized board charged with invigorating the schools, dealing increasingly with the militant teachers' union and finding the best superintendent in the U.S.
$$ for A's. After four months of scouring 56 major cities, the searchers, led by Dean Francis Keppel of Harvard's Graduate School of Education (now U.S. Commissioner of Education), solidly recommended Calvin Gross of Pittsburgh.
Gross was something unheard of at Livingston Street: a superintendent from outside the city. But he did have a New York tie. His father Harry, the son of an immigrant Jewish tailor, was born in Queens, went through New York public schools and graduated from C.C.N.Y. With his wife, whose maiden name was Calvin, Father Gross migrated to Los Angeles in 1916 in a Model T Ford. A math teacher and engineer, he soon became the no-nonsense principal of San Fernando High School.
Son Calvin learned early that learning pays—at least sometimes. At the age of four, his father promised him a dime "if you can tell me what three fours are." "Twelve," piped the boy. Surprised, his father asked how he knew and was told: "Well, two threes are six, so four threes must be twelve." Harry promised his son a dollar for each A on his report card, but chickened out when his son got more A's than a barrel of aardvarks.
Skipping three grades, Cal Gross at ten became one of his father's junior high students and manfully suffered the gibes of being "Old Man Gross's son." Skinny and underage, he survived by earning respect as one of the school's least likely football lettermen.