Word: thurstons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Department of Health. Education and Welfare, he has a big title with comparatively little authority. He sponsors worthy projects and collects worthy statistics, but his main function is less to administer than to advise. Last week President Eisenhower nominated a man who should fill the post well: Lee M. Thurston of Michigan...
Genial Republican Thurston, 57, has left a trail of chalk dust behind him. A Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, he started out as a high-school science teacher in Manistee. worked his way up to be Michigan's superintendent of public instruction. A restless, bubbling executive, he ran his 8,000 schools and 42,000 teachers with amiable efficiency. But he was no ordinary bureaucrat: the best way to run a school, he insists, is to have an enlightened local citizenry do the job itself...
...Thurston has indicated that he will stick by his philosophy. The big task for the Office of Education, he says, is to "make far greater use, in a cooperative relationship, of the several state departments of education." As a sort of beneficent uncle and general counsel to U.S. education ($14,800 a year), Thurston will go right on doing what came naturally in Michigan: teaching Americans how they can get better schools themselves...
Rumors & Results. Then, last month, the town began to hear some strange rumors about its schools. For some reason that no one in Sandusky quite understood, State Superintendent Lee M. Thurston began an investigation of Smith's enrollment records. Last week Thurston announced the results. He had just uncovered, said he, "the most serious school scandal ever to confront...
According to Thurston's investigators, the scandal had really begun back in 1945. In that year Smith's enrollment figures suddenly began to soar, entitling Sandusky to thousands of extra dollars in state aid. Though no one suspected it at the time, Sandusky's school lists were just about as phony as Chichikov's serfs in Dead Souls. By 1950, said the investigators, Superintendent Smith was claiming state aid for 1,243 pupils, when his actual total enrollment was only 797. Last year he claimed 1,253 pupils, actually had only 785. Some of the names...