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CLARK, JOE LOUIS 1939-

HIGH-SCHOOL PRINCIPAL

National Folk Hero

Joe Louis Clark, principal of inner-city Eastside High School in Paterson, New Jersey, gained a wide reputation as a folk hero when national news reports showed him patrolling his halls with a bullhorn and baseball bat in hand. After six years of Clark's leadership at a school where 90 percent of the students were black or Hispanic and most came from poor families, Eastside boasted order and some improvement in test scores. Parents and students praised him for restoring order and instruction to a school once called a "caldron of terror and violence," and Education Secretary William Bennett held him up as an example of what strong leadership can accomplish in the nation's most troubled urban schools. Clark exhibited that leadership by working the halls and corridors like a consummate politician, shouting through his bullhorn at students, but usually addressing them by name and inquiring about their progress. "A lot of students here have it bad at home," said a junior who supported Clark's approach. "But they can come in here and say: 'This man wants something for me. I can do better'"

A Man of Extremes

However, Clark's critics, among them some school board members, raised serious questions about his methods. He ran into trouble in 1988 with the Board of Education for expelling failing students who he said did not deserve a diploma. In 1982, his first year, he threw out three hundred of the three thousand students at Eastside, the state's second largest school. More followed. From 1983 to 1986 the total of students who dropped out or were forced out was 1,904. In 1988, when he banned some sixty students who he said were "all leeches, miscreants and hoodlums," he was ordered to take the students back. In New Jersey principals cannot expel students, only school boards can. Circumstances had changed: while earlier boards tolerated the expulsions, in the late 1980s three new members argued that legally, the state was responsible for providing free public education to students until they are twenty-one. "We have to uphold the law," one new member asserted.

Teacher Charges

Some teachers at Eastside High felt intimidated by Clark. His memos indicated that their perception was warranted. Three teachers who were Paterson Education Association delegates received memos titled "Denunciation of Your Anarchistic Activities," which ended, "I invite you to purge yourselves of the demons that make you so dangerous to the very institutions and ideologies to which you should be dedicating your professional lives or to purge the Paterson school system by leaving it."

Microcosm of Reform Problems

The students still in school wholeheartedly supported Clark and threatened to march on the school board if Clark were replaced. "If Mr. Clark goes, we all go," said a junior. Paterson Education Association's superintendent, Dr. Frank Napier, staunchly supported Clark's efforts to remove problem students, maintaining that lower schools had already failed them and they could not be educated. And Clark's approach did yield some positive results. At Eastside under Clark's leadership, scores on a statewide proficiency test given at the end of the freshman year rose, and scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) also improved. In both cases, however, scores were still significantly below the national averages. Reforming Paterson's inner-city schools presented the same problems other reform-minded high-school administrators faced: were individual student rights more important than the good of the whole? While William Bennett called Clark "a national folk hero," his own employers, the school board, charged him with insubordination.