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Clark's brand of discipline is often harsh. On a single day in his first year, he threw out 300 students for being tardy or absent and, he said, for disrupting the school. "Leeches and parasites," he calls such pupils. Over the next five years he tossed out hundreds more. Faculty members hostile to $ his vision were dismissed or strongly encouraged to leave. During his six-year tenure some 100 have departed, including a basketball coach who was hustled out by security guards for failing to stand at attention during the singing of the school alma mater. "I expurgated them through a vast variety of methods," says Clark, savoring his idiosyncratic polysyllables.
Some people thought that Clark's expurgations had gone too far. In a typically unilateral action, the pugnacious principal last month tossed out 66 "parasitic" students without due process or approval of the school board, insisting that they were "hoodlums, thugs and pathological deviants." The board blew the whistle, charging him with insubordination and threatening him with dismissal.
Almost overnight that local spat found its way onto front pages all across the U.S. The Eastside story -- Clark's battle to restore order in his school -- became a kind of allegory for all the tribulations, dangers and scattered triumphs of cities large and small, where public education is undergoing its most severe challenge. In a country fed up with kids out of control, Clark seems to represent one effort to return to the law-and-order of a more innocent time. In recent weeks the Paterson principal has found himself not only the subject of network news reports but also a sought-after guest on TV talk shows. CBS's 60 Minutes has shot a segment on the maverick educator, and Warner Bros. has snapped up the rights to his life story ("six figures," plus a percentage of the net, for Joe), with Sidney Poitier as a possible star. "Isn't it something," Clark beams, "that this little black Newark welfare boy is the most popular man in America right now?"
The bat-wielding principal has even caught the eye and ear of the White House. President Reagan has commended Clark as an exemplar of the tough leadership needed in urban schools. In the wake of the board battle, U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett telephoned to urge Clark to "hang in there." In an even grander gesture of support, Gary Bauer, a former Bennett aide now serving as White House Policy Development Director, offered Eastside's chief a White House post as policy adviser. (Clark turned him down.) Tough leaders like Clark have an important place in the nation's schools, Bennett told the press a few weeks ago. "Sometimes you need Mr. Chips, sometimes you need Dirty Harry."