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Keep This Man. With a quick mind of the math-and-music kind, Gross won honors in math at U.C.L.A. ('40) and picked up a Phi Beta Kappa key. R.O.T.C. led him to a lieutenancy in the Army, and as part of a wartime antiaircraft unit he followed the sweep from Normandy to Germany. He went home to meet a girl who had written to him in the Army as a fellow member of the city's high school honor society. She was bright, modest Bernice Hayman, daughter of a Los Angeles fire captain, and Gross promptly married her. Gross had attended Presbyterian Sunday school as a kid; he and Bernice worked in the Baptist church; now both are Unitarians.
While earning his master's degree at U.S.C., Gross became a math-science teacher in Los Angeles, went on to become chairman of the math department at Jefferson High School, a job held by his father 22 years before. Jefferson students were by then nearly all Negroes; the job gave Gross a closeup experience with the climate of a de facto segregated school. Gross's personnel record at the L.A. board of education glows with such encomiums as "Outstanding" and "Don't let this man go." But he went, in 1950, to take a one-year fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, under Dean Keppel.
In 1951 Gross slid into his first superintendency in Weston, a Boston suburb with one-thousandth as many students as he now has. His main dress rehearsal for New York came a few years later in Pittsburgh. That system is far smaller (114 schools, 77,500 students), but it had plenty of big-city problems when Gross took over. Aggressively recruiting in 18 states, Gross raised salaries 25% for beginners, offered a 10% merit bonus for master teachers. He brought in Andover's Dean Alan R. Blackmer to start a full menu of courses for gifted students, hired "lay reader" housewives to grade English compositions. Experiment-minded foundations gave Gross $1,500,000, and as one result Pittsburgh has the nation's biggest team-teaching effort—teams of subject-specialists teaching 8,500 pupils in mainly Negro neighborhoods.
Locked Doors. Gross is "a three-R man," and he interprets the goal of the R's as high intellectual attainment. He abhors "extraneous subjects," labels driver education "a good example of a certified, gold-plated frill," refuses to let schools "hang out shingles as baby sitters." Scornful of common-denominator teaching, he aims to concentrate on "children who are either very bright or fairly dull, or who seem dull because their intellectual potential is masked by the ravages of slum life."
For exceptionally bright pupils, he proposes two years of college work in high school—thus spurring lesser students to greater effort. For the dull, Gross has an equally sweeping prescription: absolute insistence on mastery of reading before a child is allowed to go on. When a child slips in reading, says Gross, "put him in a class that's half as big and double the time he spends on reading. If he continues to slip, cut the class size and increase the time once again, because he has to learn to read! If he can't read well, he'll find locked doors for the rest of his life."