A New Commissioner

Next to Robert McNamara, the man with the fastest-growing job in Washington may well be the U.S. Commissioner of Education. Serving under Health, Education and Welfare Secretary John Gardner, the commissioner is responsible for an ever expanding variety of federal programs, ranging from school integration to college scholarships to developing new teaching techniques. Last week President Johnson named to the job Harold Howe II, 47, a proven administrator in both public and private education, to succeed Francis Keppel (TIME cover, Oct. 15).

The son of an All-America quarterback at Yale, Howe is recalled by one of his own Yale classmates, Presidential Assistant McGeorge Bundy, as "the most respected man in the class" ('40). He taught history at one of the nation's top private prep schools, Andover's Phillips Academy (he went to Taft himself). As a high school principal in Newton, Mass., Howe devised an Oxford-style house system that divided 3,000 students into six groups, each with separate faculty and advisers. His experiments in Newton led to his appointment as superintendent of the Scarsdale, N.Y., school system in 1960. Howe comes to HEW after a year as director of North Carolina's Learning Institute, a pioneer program in training children of poor families.

One of Howe's toughest problems will be school integration. At a Washington press conference, he said that "a great deal has been done" in the South, and implied that he would try to persuade states to do more before exercising such powerful weapons as withholding federal aid. In the North, Howe saw a long struggle to end the de facto segregation created by housing patterns, but added, "I'm not going to come out against neighborhood schools everywhere."

As for Keppel, he will spend full time on a second job created for him last September: Assistant Secretary of HEW. As commissioner, he had attempted to withhold some $30 million worth of federal aid to Chicago schools because of racial segregation, and had brashly told the Sigma Chi fraternity that unless it integrated, the colleges where it has chapters would lose federal aid. He will now give primary attention to the problem of trying to coordinate the conflicting, overlapping educational activities of 43 federal agencies.

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