"You used to call me Crazy Joe," he said. "Now you can call me Batman!"
It's not that Joe Clark doesn't like his image, it's just that his image isn't entirely accurate. "I never used that baseball bat in the school," he told his standing-room-only crowd. Clark was referring to the now-famous Time magazine cover photo of the former principal holding a baseball bat. He said he picked up the bat right before photographers arrived in order to signal to "the drug dealers, gang leaders, and other miscreants" that he wouldn't tolerate anybody or any activity that interrupted learning.
"When you're bold, you have to be bold," Clark said in an address that was more revival meeting than speech. "Principals especially," he added, cannot let anyone "manipulate the building" for which they are responsible. "Take the authority," he commanded.
Although retired, Clark has lost none of the fire that helped him turn around a failing inner-city school. He called on educators to do whatever is needed to help kids learn—school bureaucracy be damned. "Don't try to placate, appease, or pacify people. If you lose your job, so what? God will give you another one!"
And commenting on the film that attempted to tell his story, Joe Clark exclaimed: "In the movie, they downplayed me!"
"When you go back to your schools and districts, you may be in a situation where you're trying to initiate change, and you're fought against," therapist and bilingual educator Terry Tafoya told his audience. Tafoya used Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to explain why initiating change can be an uphill battle. At the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy are physiological needs; then, in ascending order, come the needs for safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. Too often, Tafoya said, advocates of change aim their arguments at the self-actualization level, when the people they're trying to convince are "down there at the safety level."
"There's an old sight gag with a pyramid of oranges. Someone reaches for an orange and the entire pyramid collapses. Metaphorically," Tafoya continued, "this is what happens when you try to initiate change. You'll try to sell the change by saying, `I was at this conference, and I have these innovative ideas that will increase our effectiveness and better serve our kids and community.' You're trying to sell it completely at the self-actualization level. If your colleagues are at the safety level, they'll see that you're reaching for an orange, and they have no way of knowing which is a key orange. So you may have to change your marketing strategy to sell the idea to colleagues who are fearful."