Eastside Story

...C lark's ideas are hardly original— one hears echoes of Thomas Sowell and Charles Murray...

...Blacks have to rediscover the dignity of work...

...They're not interested in educational issues...

...He insists "that's what this country is all about—the door of opportunity being open to everyone...

...All this was too much for the local politicos...

...Everywhere they know about us," says Shareen, a tenthgrader...

...Meanwhile, he goes about his rounds, bullhorn in hand, checking out his plant and his people like a competent and effective CEO...

...Asked about the rumors, Clark didn't exactly say, "No comment...

...is a psychoanalyst and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School...

...It should be just the opposite...

...But you have to be willing to work hard...

...The place to teach black history and black culture," he maintains, "is in the church and in the home, not in the schools...

...One thing is clear...

...C lark's own family moved to New Jersey from Georgia when he was two...

...Perhaps even more than his insistence on a single standard of academic performance, Clark has proclaimed the corrupting influence of the doctrine of displaced responsibility...

...That's racist...

...Much as he may be admired by the student body at Eastside High, Joe Clark is not a hero to everyone...

...In between problems, Clark delivers himself of thoughts on a number of issues...

...Normally, when parents hold a social value in high esteem—a competitive sport, say, or music, or learning, or religious observance—they will encourage their children in acquiring the appropriate cognitive skills...

...With the drug pushers and muggers thrown out, security guards stationed at the doors, teachers patrolling the halls, and the walls and floors cleaned up, school spirit replaced fear and chaos, and teaching and learning could begin...

...Napier's request for volunteers from the ranks of his administrators yielded only one response from a group of eighty...

...He's in the hallways as the students arrive at eight, and a short time afterward he's moving in and out of classes to say good morning...

...What he said was, "I have no cognizance about what you are talking about...

...The dropout rate has not decreased, the number of graduates going on to college has not increased, and while Minimum Basic Skills test scores improved, results of the more difficult High School Proficiency Test administered since 1984 have been unacceptably low, particularly in math...

...they've never visited Eastside High, sat in classrooms or walked the corridors...

...And not least, they respect him for bringing the bureaucratic establishment to its knees...

...Second, no matter what standards THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 23 Clark may inspire, and no matter what standards the youngsters may accept currently, there is a serious limiting factor at work, something akin to developmental inertia: a young mind at rest tends to remain at rest...

...But the real issue in Paterson is no longer simply an educational one...

...and students and teachers were so demoralized that little if any learning could take place...

...Clark doesn't think his opposition is racist, but political...

...Young black girls are having babies as if it was going out of style...

...Once in, they were informed in no uncertain terms that they would be expected to behave in the corridors, to stay in their classYale Kramer, MD...

...Students' response was positive...

...schools" by a County Security and Criminal Investigations Committee...

...He didn't want, he says, to be "the recipient of handouts from the system...

...a young mind in motion tends to remain in motion...

...The displacement of responsibility is tempting, easy, and ultimately self-defeating...

...Clark took to the school's P.A...

...In 1979 it was described as "a microcosm of the conflict, turmoil and violence in U.S...

...The issue has become Joe Clark the man...

...rr heir affection, and something verging on awe, is apparent as one accompanies him on his early morning rounds through the school, where he arrives every morning a little after six...

...Clark asserts with the perfervid conviction of one who's been there that the first step to academic salvation is to accept ownership of failure...

...Clark's recently published book, Laying Down the Law: Joe Clark's Strategy for Saving Our Schools,' is spiced with anecdotes of conversion "from drugs and crime -to success in life through diligent striving," with dollops of selfcongratulation folded in here and there...

...he treats them with courtesy and they return it...

...Blacks have to get into business, buy and own things...

...They respect him for his success, some of which they identify with...

...When Clark became principal of Eastside High School in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1982, the school was on the verge of being taken over by the state...

...The mainly teenage audience cheered the feisty principal as he battled and bested teenage hoodlums and pushers, malevolent parents, incompetent or unwilling teachers, hypocritical bureaucrats, and exploitive politicians...

...and, most serious, claiming that academic achievement has failed to materialize as it should have once order was established in the school...

...What the schools should teach is that every group is included...

...They had started out together as young teachers, but while Napier's career took off, carrying him up the bureaucratic ladder to the superintendent's office, his friend Clark remained stuck in his position as a junior high school teacher...

...When he was a teenager, family problems brought hard times and for a while the family was on welfare, but not Joe himself, who always worked, sometimes at two jobs, from the time he was nine or ten...

...If you can't make it in America, there's nowhere you can make it...

...He preaches the importance of economic power to academic self-improvement...

...Joe Clark doesn't claim to speak for God, but he often gives the impression of unwavering certainty about the rectitude of his goals and methods...

...Clark is bitter about the way in which white liberals make special allowances for black and Hispanic youth, "as though normal behavior patterns were alien to them...

...This episode has nothing to do with Clark's performance...

...In most cases it's not a matter of innate intelligence but of capacities that have lain fallow during the most crucial years of development...

...His skirmishes with the Paterson City Council and local school board members have escalated into full-scale war, and North Jersey local newspapers have run editorials criticizing him for throwing students out without due process...

...When Clark is not immediately present, his influence on the youngsters begins to fade...

...Whether he will stay the course can only be a matter of conjecture...

...No one but an individual with a sense of mission on a grand scale would have undertaken the daunting task of turning Eastside High around...

...Now there is nothing to hide the fact that there are practical limitations to acquiring certain cognitive skills...

...The city council—those pusillanimous poltroons—can't force me out...

...The black race will self-destruct...

...You have to start lower down, restructure the system from the bottom up...

...He will need more than a bullhorn to get through to them...

...And it seemed to make sense that he might be the man for the job of turning Eastside High around...

...his critics say he's promoting Joe Clark...

...He was impatient with the incompetents he saw all around him in the system and didn't hesitate to refer to them as "lollipops" or worse...

...Stung by what he feels is unfair criticism, Clark plans to take a year's "sabbatical" from Eastside, using his accumulated sick leave and vacation pay...

...They will send them to Sunday school or give them piano lessons or read to them or buy them a baseball glove...

...He is mindful of the countless men in the early years of this century who, as young immigrants with little English and less education, became peddlers or house painters or junkdealers and then small businessmen, and who eventually sent their kids to City College and saw their grandchildren graduate from Yale and Harvard law schools...

...We saw the film in an uptown theater in New York City, the only middle-aged white people in the audience...

...In addition to clearly stating the rules and the consequences of not following them, Clark wrote, he made sure "the principal and his bullhorn were most visible and audible throughout all parts of the building...

...He blamed the academic inferiority of inner-city students on the unwillingness of urban school principals to risk unpopularity by enforcing discipline, which in turn would establish order in the school, then an atmosphere of school pride, and, finally, academic achievement—a program he described as his new "management plan...

...One way or another, he always seemed to be in the local news...

...It's impossible in the present system...

...q 'Regnery Gateway, $17.95...

...Drug dealers roamed freely through the classrooms and corridors...

...As the teacher was being led out of the school, Clark described him over the PA system as a "pervert...

...Clark intuitively understood that what the youngsters needed was the continuing presence of a strong and caring fatherly person, an experience which many of his students had never had...

...University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey...

...Perhaps both, since big-time perks have always come with the job of prophet...

...Along the way he attacks "welfare, the quota system, and the dumbed-down education system for the inner cities" as well as "those who rise to power by throwing money at the disadvantaged, and the foolish among the disadvantaged who prefer reliance on the dole to working to advance themselves...

...As everyone who goes to the movies knows, Clark is the real-life hero of Lean On Me, which tells the story of how, baseball bat and bullhorn in hand, he took over and saved a rotting inner-city high school that everyone else had given up on...

...gang members beat up and knifed each other, terrorized students, and assaulted teachers...

...Politics can play a crucial role in getting things on the front burner...

...And, contrary to the shibboleths of the black bureaucracy and liberal gurus of the past twenty years, he has understood the need of these children for a single standard of conduct and academic performance for all—black or white, and rich or poor...

...We give them minimum basic skills and then we have dummy classes to prepare them for the high school proficiency test, but they have had no exposure to science and math...

...In families in which this encouragement is lacking or insufficient, however, the youngsters will find it difficult to respond to situations calling for such skills, even though they may be highly motivated to do so...

...He put himself through college, earned a master's degree, served eight years in the Army reserves...

...Ultimately, Napier was forced to suspend Clark for a week in mid-March...

...Being an educator," he told a reporter, "you automatically become a politician...

...Clark thinks, in other words, that what blacks should be doing is buying into the system...

...They respect him for his demeanor...

...The "cauldron of violence" described in the county prosecutor's report had been transformed into a recognizable high school by a tough "manager," as Joe Clark likes to refer to himself, imposing strict discipline, unyielding standards, and unequivocal expectations for its inner-city minority students...

...All they are owed, their birthright, is an education—free access to the door of opportunity...

...They have the wrong priorities...

...I've invited them to discuss the school budget process with me and gotten no response...

...They're not my colleagues, just a bunch of little pups...

...He says the members of the city council who oppose him are jealous of the national attention he's been getting...

...Look at the Jews...

...If I leave here, despite my feeling for my students and my school, it will be because inner-city education as it exists today fosters ineptitude...

...The government shouldn't be doing everything for us, the government should only make things accessible so we can do things for ourselves...

...trash littered the floors and graffiti marred the walls and lockers...

...The reason had less to do with ability or ambition than with personality...

...And he showed he meant business by throwing out those who didn't follow the rules...

...When everything is available—welfare, food stamps—why work...

...Hayden taught math, not history...

...The youngsters at Eastside High are equally admiring of Clark...

...Liberals reward the unproductive...

...They have Calvin Klein jeans on their behinds and nothing in their heads...

...But it's what happens after that that constitutes education: drawing previously undisciplined but still unskilled and often unmotivated youngsters into the universe of ideas—and in order to get there, mastering the signs and symbols in which thoughts are organized and expressed...

...Clark is intuitively correct to haunt the school hallways, cafeterias, classrooms, and gyms—he knows his constituency needs concrete evidence of his presence...

...Rumors circulated that Clark might be suspended, or that he was threatening to resign...

...Eastside's scores remain among the lowest in the state...

...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989...

...and stoops to pick up a lone scrap of paper...

...The principal must be omnipresent," he says...

...In it he serves up his recipe for establishing order in schools and pride and responsibility in their students...

...It was Paterson's superintendent of schools, Frank Napier, a friend and colleague portrayed in Lean On Me, who brought Clark to Eastside High...

...Clark himself maintains that test scores "will never go beyond a realistic level because we're getting an inferior product," that by the time students come to Eastside High most of them are so far behind that there is no way for them to catch up...

...On the first day of the school term in 1982, Clark took up a position on the steps of the main entrance with the bullhorn that has become his trademark and commanded students to file past him in orderly lines...

...My love, sweat, toil, fervor, zeal, blood, sweat, and tears are in the walls and tiles of this place, those plants you see in the hallways...

...O n Joe Clark's desk sits a pile of papers waiting for his signature, and a half-eaten fruit cup he hasn't had time to finish...

...I'm the manager of this building...

...The furor that followed coincided with the nationwide opening of Lean On Me...

...He doesn't treat them with disguised contempt by making special rules for his students, nor does he treat them with undisguised contempt by abandoning them...

...Something has to be done to halt this pillaging and preying or our cities will be torn to pieces...

...In 1976, when Napier became superintendent, he began giving a leg up to his outspoken friend...

...Clark was made head of an elementary school not far from Eastside High in which only 33 percent of the students were reading at grade level...

...First, for many of his students, he can merely provide an external source of inspiration rather than the permanent inner ideals that are necessary to guide young people through the frustrating and tempting experiences of life...

...T oe Clark is an original, and like all J originals he has something of the prophet in him...

...and "Working on that math, Gary...

...He doesn't indulge these kids or romanticize their weaknesses...

...He and his wife, Hazel, have three children...

...Only his unswerving dedication made the transformation possible...

...The dancers on a school assembly program he had perfunctorily approved turned out to be strippers, and as video cameras rolled (no one can quite account for them being on hand) the danseuse peeled off the male dancers' garments down to your basic G-string, at which point (and not before) indignant school staff members stopped the show...

...He was also making frequent appearances on TV and commanding impressive lecture fees...

...Faced with this daunting predicament, Clark places great trust in practical economics...

...They see the drug dealers driving around in their BMWs—they call it the Black Man's Whirl...

...Like any of the good prophets of old, he intuitively uses symbols—his bullhorn and baseball bat—as well as the iconography that the press and media provide, in the service of his mission...

...Such an emphasis suggests that for those children who persistently demonstrate that they lack the cognitive skills necessary to perform along traditional academic lines, a more productive alternative to dropping out, failing, or marginal performance is a program stressing the acquisition of practical wisdom—marketable craft skills, for example, or perhaps entrepreneurial habits...

...I see them behaving in here, then going out there on the streets of the community and acting depraved...

...Black students on campuses all over the country where I lecture tell me they feel betrayed by an educational system that offers them dummy classes and dummy diplomas, leaves them without the skills to compete with white and Asian kids in math, in history . . . "It's lack of diligence, not genetics that keeps inner-city youth down...

...It was Joe Clark...

...They should stop flapping their lips...

...Fifty years ago they couldn't go to Florida...

...After his appearance on the cover of Time he was interviewed on network TV talk shows and news programs, praised by the governor, invited to Washington to talk with then-Department of Education Secretary William J. Bennett, and by early this year was being cheered by audiences, largely young and black, in hundreds of theaters across the nation in the person of actor Morgan Freeman...

...According to him, the resolution was "pure hypocrisy, political grandstanding...

...But he has a chance of being listened to in places where they are not: among black students on college campuses and among black businessmen and community leaders...

...Shortly after the elections it was his firing of the school's football coach, and just into the new year he successfully defended a lawsuit charging him with slandering a male teacher he had dismissed for allegedly fondling female students...

...There was talk of a movie sequel...

...Ultimately, if anyone can influence me to stay, you my students are the only ones...

...But Clark's experience at Eastside has also raised other unforeseen and disturbing questions...

...So they bought the whole damn state and now they go wherever they want...

...This is the house that Joe built...

...One of them should have bought the Eastern Airlines shuttle, not Donald 'Frump...

...He greets students by name, gives a high-five to one, a hug THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 21 to another, asks, "How's the baby, Leona...

...That's what keeps them on welfare, keeps them educationally and economically disenfranchised...

...Councilman Kenneth Hayden, the author of the resolution, charged that while Clark "capitalized on his celebrity status," academic performance failed to improve significantly at Eastside High...

...The oldest of seven in a poor family, he grew up in Newark, where he attended the local public schools...

...My soul is tired," he says...

...It's sometimes difficult to say whether he is about to reap the American whirlwind or reach for a piece of the American pie...

...They are insidious, invidious lemmings, marching to get on TV...

...By the time he left, 98 percent of the students were reading at grade level...

...He infuriated city officials and civil libertarians by chaining the outside doors in violation of fire laws to keep the drug pushers out and expelling troublemakers without board of education authorization...

...he has made Eastside High famous and they feel part of it...

...Clark would urge the present generation to acquire as much wealth (and the power that comes with it) as they can from work, entrepreneurship, and an orientation to the future, leaving a legacy of more highly developed cognitive skills to their sons and daughters...

...These may range from having no coat to having no one to stay with the baby...

...But the occasion that brought the roof of Eastside High down on his head occurred in February, while Clark was in California taping a TV talk show...

...This aura of infallibility is fascinating and reassuring to the children of Eastside High and their perplexed parents in need of a leader...

...He quotes Edmund Burke on that "species of benevolence, which arises from contempt...

...Clark's style is a rebuke to the legacy of the antinomian sixties, to the loss of adult authority in the schools when student rights took the place of student needs...

...From the time he was eighteen he undertook the role of head of the family to his six younger brothers and sisters, going to school during the day and working at night...

...This usually results, over a period of ten or fifteen years, in a set of skills that can be used in the service of the social values the children wish to assert...

...Superintendent Napier scoffs at Hayden's explanation...

...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 that he was "not really an educator" but only "an entertainer, a huckster...

...Blacks have to stop blaming the white man, talking about what he owes them...

...Napier points out that there were no complaints from any parents, teachers, or administrators about Clark's performance during what he referred to as "this political folly," adding that "Hayden and his supporters have no administrative experience in public education...

...Some of them make millions, billions in sports and entertainment...

...I galvanize the hopes and aspirations of all people...

...rooms, to show respect to their teachers, to pay attention in class—or be suspended...

...charging that many teachers have left Eastside because of his authoritarian style and abrasive manner...

...This kind of slogan thinking—missing, as it does, the more complex aspects of human motivation and psychological development—has been used to rationalize policy for a juvenile justice system that doesn't work, for a drug enforcement system that doesn't work, and for an educational system that doesn't work...

...marijuana and heroin were traded and used in the bathrooms...

...They use drugs, but not in here...

...Young black men are violent and out of control...

...In the clean, well-ordered environment he has provided for his students, the unthinkable may reveal itself with a clarity not possible in the past, when it was obscured by chaos, drugs, crime, fear, and brutality...

...The city council passed a resolution censuring Clark, while local editorialists charged Joe Clark doesn't claim to speak for God, but he often gives the impression of unwavering certainty about the rectitude of his goals and methods...

...More than anything, this characteristic has led to trouble for Clark with the authorities and those who represent bureaucratic methods and pieties...

...He takes as the text of his sermon the twogeneration model of academic and class integration used by millions of American immigrants...

...In a society increasingly committed to an egalitarianism not just of opportunity but of condition, what does one do with the dawning notion that for a generation or perhaps two, the ideal of a college-preparatory or general education may be inappropriate for children with less developed capacities, and that another kind of educational ideal must therefore be formulated for them...

...He will have to articulate his message loudly, clearly, and often in order to be heard by the policymakers who control the academic fate of hundreds of thousands of inner-city schoolchildren...

...It is not difficult to understand why Clark's hard work and inspiration have produced only limited success...

...system— over which the Lean On Me soundtrack was occasionally heard in the hallways—to announce to the student body, "Your principal will not let jealous council members influence me...

...Rita Kramer's most recent book is At a Tender Age: Violent Youth and Juvenile Justice (Holt...

...They seemed to know that . . . someone cared enough to help them to behave...

...I think that time has a way of unveiling realities...

...Ninety percent of these kids are below grade level...

...In an article he wrote in 1985 for the official publication of the New Jersey school boards, Clark attributed Eastside's transformation to "the strict rules I have pronounced and diligently enforced...

...He pauses to ask a teacher monitoring the hallway about recent test scores and to ask a student what she's doing out of class...

...According to Clark, his ambition is to get his message across to a wider constituency, and he blamed his predictable two-to-one loss on "the Democrats' lock and hold on the black vote...

...The Clarks were a stable family during Joe's early years, and both his parents were hardworking...

...A onetime schoolteacher, Hayden says he told the council members that if they didn't pass the resolution it would be "like Anthony Eden coming back from Germany in 1938 with that piece of paper saying we would have peace in our time...

...There he rehearsed the turnaround he would accomplish at Eastside, requiring homework, instituting classroom and hallway discipline, and firing twenty "lollipop" teachers...

...In fact he is more of an authentic integrationist than is probably healthy for a black man with a national reputation these days...

...T n last November's elections Clark 1 ran for local office as a Republican in New Jersey's heavily Democratic Essex County...

...They can't be expected to do trigonometry and calculus when they can't count...

...He says he plans to move on beyond the world of Paterson's schools in order to give his message a wider hearing...

...it has everything to do with politics...

...His oldest daughter is an Olympic track star...

...That process is more problematic than setting the stage for it...

...In the educational reform zeal of recent years, commission after committee, report after review have told us that what turns bad schools into good ones is a strong principal able to inspire teachers and staff, pupils and parents with a conviction that high expectations can be met...

...He believes that the most powerful motivation for improving the lot of the black underclass lies in asking its members to accept the responsibility for their predicament and the responsibility for improving it...

...When she begins to tell him her troubles he sends her down to his office to wait for him along with the others whose problems he'll attend to during the course of the day...

...And it is true that Clark had signed a book contract and hired a manager to look after his "long-range career development...

...Since the sixties the loudest battle cry of the liberal establishment and the black irregular bureaucracy has been: "Don't blame the victims of a sick, racist society for their misfortune...

...I've been here seven years with no vacations, from six in the morning to five o'clock every day, Saturdays and Sundays included...

...Someone made sure the incident—with the pictures documenting it—was called to the attention of the press...

...The local Democratic press charged that he was using the campaign as a springboard for personal ambition...

...Some local worthies responded with magisterial indignation—inspired perhaps by the all-too-human wish to see Joe Clark fall from the pedestal on which the film and his growing national reputation had placed him...

...Not satisfied with this, the Paterson City Council passed a seventeen-point resolution demanding that the Board of Education "terminate the employment of Joe Clark...

...Clark's style is a rebuke to the legacy of the antinomian sixties, to the loss of adult authority in the schools when student rights took the place of student needs...

...He was a father who stayed—even in the face of unending obstacles and disasters...

...My constituency," he says, "is predominantly white, along with those blacks who are productive and hardworking...

...Clark's manner, never conciliatory, often gave offense...

...But years ago Freud noted that the prophetic personality is untroubled by guilt or self-doubt and, because of this, stands apart from earthly authority...

...And he deplores affirmative action and quotas, as he does the tendency of those he refers to as "so-called black leaders" to "blame whites for all the ills of the black community...

...The papers and the lunch, like his visitor, have to wait because of a constant series of interruptions as students bring the problems that are interfering with their schoolwork...

...Since the dawn of history the prophet, the spokesman of God, has been an object of fascination, and in his own country and time both revered and reviled...

...If they showed the same zeal in their jobs that they have shown in attacking me, they'd have gotten crack off the streets of our city by now...

...It's true that if you're black and poor you've got two strikes against you, but one strike in America is like a trillion anywhere else...

...And indeed, establishing order and discipline is the first step...

...Besides, nobody else wanted the job...