Laying Down the Law: Joe Clark's Strategy for Saving Our Schools

by Joe Clark, Joe Picard

Laying Down the Law is Joe Clark's dramatic story of how he cleaned up Eastside High School in Paterson, New Jersey, and how his prescription for reform can be duplicated by parents and principals working together to clean up their own neighborhood schools. This is more than just one man's story of what needs to be done to reform our nation's schools. It is a call for people to care enough about their schools, their children, and our nation's future to act with the neces-sary resolution and vigor to stem the pernicious tide of permissiveness, crime, and academic decline that Americans have accepted for far too long.

Genres: Autobiography

208 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1989

Reviews

[Dena Lake · Rating 2 out of 5]

After finally seeing "Lean on Me," I had to read this book so I could make comparisons...it wasn't bad. Clark definitely makes some good points that still ring true a few decades later, although I can't say that I entirely agree with his 'strategy for saving our schools.' In the introduction though, he really outlines the cost of drop-outs to the country--if leaders do not want to pay attention to our apartheid schools for the right reasons, you would think they would for financial reasons:

"We pay for unemployment. We pay for welfare. And the unskilled dropout who can't get a job often turns to crime and drugs. The lowest estimated cost for these million dropouts per year is $60 billion [in 1989]. When lost tax revenue and losses from vandalism are factored in, the pricetag soars to an estimated $228 billion. Even at the lower estimate, we are paying $60,000 per year per dropout. A year's worth of education per student costs between $3,000 and $4,000" (Clark 4).

"We are, at huge and steadily mounting costs to ourselves, creating a vast and permanent underclass that is shot through with drugs and violence, ignorance and resentment, frustration and anger, that will spill outwards into more affluent areas, bringing drugs, crime, and pitiable want" (Clark 5).

[Jennifer Dines · Rating 5 out of 5]

I ordered this book online after watching "Lean on Me" for the umpteenth time. I am an educator in a large urban school system, and I would have loved to work under Joe Clark. This book discusses Clark's personal trajectory into education and outlines his strategies for running a school where every student is learning. He believes in order, efficiency, and academic achievement, and he is willing to act in the best interest of students who come to school to learn skills that will prepare them for college and careers that will move them out of poverty, providing them with greater control of their own destinies. Clark is fearless and bold; his words provide hope as to how urban schools could and should be truly educating students with the skills they need for success, as opposed to being containment buildings that hold the students until they graduate with mediocre skills or drop out of school altogether.