A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

Sometimes an interview can be an exercise in, well, exercise. When TIME Correspondent Janice Simpson called Joe Clark, the controversial New Jersey high school principal, and asked him to sound off for this week's cover story on school discipline, Clark invited her to accompany him on his rounds. Off they went at breakneck speed, he with his infamous bullhorn in hand, she with her notebook. Clark strode swiftly along the corridors, swooping down to pick up stray scraps of paper and barking orders at his staff. When Clark finally sat down to talk, he remained hyperactive, bouncing out of his seat to make heartfelt points. After a dozen interviews with other educators in New Jersey, Simpson came away exhausted. "I'm not sure whether Joe Clark's way of dealing with troubled urban schools is the right way," she says. "But I'm sure it's the only way for Joe Clark."

Simpson knows the problems of inner-city schools firsthand, having grown up in New York City's Harlem. Her public-school teachers were "tough and demanding," she recalls, and steered her to academic success. She was then spotted by "A Better Chance," a privately funded program that selects what she describes as "poor but promising" students for private schools. She attended the Waynflete School in Portland, Me., then enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College.

Simpson's first job was with Woman's Day, where she reported "on a grab bag of subjects from Bibles to motorcycles." In 1975 she switched journalistic gears and moved to San Francisco for the Wall Street Journal. She joined TIME's New York bureau in 1979, pausing to go back to school for a year as a Walter Bagehot Fellow in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia University. There she specialized in Latin America, which won her an assignment covering Nicaragua.

Simpson returned to the Journal in 1986 to write about education but came back to TIME (permanently, we hope) two weeks ago. Based once more in New York City, she chases after a range of issues, including an educational system that she believes needs both some of Joe Clark's tough discipline and a lot of tender care. "After all," Simpson says, "we can't compete economically or find a cure for cancer or AIDS unless our young people -- all of them -- are given the skills."