Word: jansen
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...took Mayor Bill O'Dwyer ten long months to get around to giving Bill Jansen his blessing to run the schools back in 1947 - ten months in which the Board of Education scoured the whole country to find a superintendent from another city. This executive reluctance-something which has done the superintendent no harm at all in the years since O'Dwyer tumbled from public esteem-was understandable enough. So was O'Dwyer's final decision. Jansen has all the basic virtues. He is a strong, calm, kindly man, able to soak up work like...
Dedicated Endeavor. Few men symbolize the system as well as Superintendent Bill Jansen, who has stood steadily, even stolidly at its helm since 1947. Like many of his students and many of his teachers, he is the son of an immigrant himself. His father, a Danish cabinetmaker from Kiel, settled in The Bronx, toiled diligently at his exacting trade (Jansen's Park Avenue apartment boasts a collection of intricately inlaid tables fitted by his father's hands), endured hard times and planned better lives for his children. Jansen, a big, strong boy. knew what he wanted...
...went to Morris High School. He went on to Columbia University's Teachers College, the academic nest in which John Dewey hatched his theories of progressive education (theories which the New York school system began adopting after World War I and from which Middle-of-the-Roader Jansen still cautiously borrows today). He went back to the public schools as a teacher, married a fellow teacher - a vivacious physical education instructor named Frances Allan - and in 45 years of ambitious and dedicated endeavor has risen to the top of the system's intricate hierarchy...
Delicate Balances. Bill Jansen fits his job well, for his most trying task is that of preserving a delicate and highly disconcerting series of political balances. By an unwritten law of New York politics, the mayor's Board of Education-to which Jansen answers-consists of three Protestants, three Catholics and three Jews (at present also, one of the nine is a Negro). The schools cannot afford to risk the veto of any group. In picking his own board of superintendents-the general staff which executes his commands-Lutheran Jansen likewise keeps a balance of three Protestants, three Catholics...
Despite this rigid top hamper, the innate cumbersomeness of the school system, and the enormous tasks to which it has addressed itself, Jansen feels well justified in pointing with modest pride to dozens of its accomplishments. He makes no apologies for its elephantine proportions. "New York," he says simply, "is a fact. You can't break it into smaller cities...