It's obvious that the writers for this film have never actually taught before or have even spent time dealing with school policies. I'm a teacher with a decade's worth of experience and I cringe every time o see this film and others like Freedom Writers. For starters, you can't just expel students by calling up suspected drug dealers on a stage and boom, you're gone. It's a process any time a child is expelled and there is a hearing. Secondly, yelling at teachers the way Clark does will simply get the faculty to tune you out. A principal cannot fire a teacher unless they touch a child or steal money. Bad evaluations and pressure from the admin are a way to make you want to quit but all a teacher has to do is go to their Union Rep and Big Bad Joe Clark is now all of a sudden just Joe Clark. Third, you can be a harda** all you want but if the kids don't want to learn, they simply won't. You can't force a 17 year old to learn if they don't want to. Most of the desire to learn is formulated at home when the kids are young not by some authoritarian principal or even caring teachers. The film implies that all one has to do to be effective is yell and scream. I can assure you that it's far more difficult than that, otherwise in reality, it'd be easy to be an educator. It isn't. Lastly, the only true things about this film is that there is an Eastside High School in New Jersey and a man named Joe Clark was once a principal there. Did the test scores actually go up? No. Did the state actually threaten to take the school over? Not when the movie takes place but ironically enough, the state of New Jersey took over after the film's release. If you want reality, go be a teacher for yourself and you'll come to hate this film as much as most other teachers do.
Review of Lean on Me
