' Stand and Deliver,' last year's film about a dedicated Hispanic math teacher, was about a teaching and learning process. And, yes, the students are able to pass a state proficiency exam, so the school can remain under local control and not be taken over by the state. He is an arrogant bully, a martinet who demands instant, unquestioning obedience. But with the exception of one halfhearted apology, Clark never does change. As the movie progresses, we wait for Clark to undergo a personality change, to soften, to grow, to start learning to respect the right of other people to have an opinion. He insults teachers in front of students, behaves in an erratic and irrational way, and conducts himself like an autocratic dictator. He suspends a teacher for daring to stoop over and pick up a piece of scrap paper while Clark was talking. He orders everyone to learn the school song, on pain of expulsion. He orders all of the graffiti painted over. Then he begins to stalk the school corridors, enforcing his own reign of terror. His first act is to call an all-school assembly, gather all the druggies and troublemakers onstage, and expel them en masse. There obviously is only one man capable of turning this situation around, and so 'Crazy' Joe Clark is brought back to Eastside. John Avildsen, the director, is so concerned with showing us the hell of Eastside High that he goes overboard the corridors look like a cross between a prison riot and a Hells' Angel rally.

Then we get an updated look at Eastside High, which has become the town's deeply troubled, mostly minority high school, where violence, drug-dealing and intimidation are facts of life, and little or no learning takes place.

It continues 20 years later, with Clark more-or-less happily teaching in a good school in a nice neighborhood. 'Lean on Me' opens with a brief sequence showing Clark starting out at a well-run Eastside High in the 1960s, alienating his principal and being transferred out. As an administrator, he shoots first and doesn't ask questions afterwards: He's sort of the Dirty Harry of the Paterson, N.J., educational system.

Karen malina white