Growing up in rural North Carolina, all Ron Clark wanted was adventure and travel. He had no intention of staying in one place or being a teacher. When his first overseas tour was cut short by illness, Clark found himself back home and filling in as a substitute teacher. A permanent teaching position followed in a school known for students with behavior problems and learning disabilities. That challenge launched the adventure of a lifetime. With energy and creativity, Clark turned his classroom around as his students succeeded academically and became the best behaved in the school. He soon found himself in New York City teaching in a problematic Harlem school. He influenced such a positive dramatic shift within his students that the experience was turned into a television movie , The Ron Clark Story. Trips to the White House and The Oprah Winfrey Show came soon after as well as the Disney American Teacher of the Year Award.
Inspired by his grandmother’s codes of conduct and encouraged by Oprah Winfrey, Clark published The Essential 55: An Award-Winning Educator’s Rules for Discovering the Successful Student in Every Child. Other books followed, The Excellent 11: Qualities Teachers and Parents Use to Motivate, Inspire, and Educate and Move Your Bus which applies his successful leadership principles to the business world. Clark’s rising fame has answered his journeyman spirit. He has traveled the world sharing his methodologies. However, his real passion still lies in the classroom. In 2004, Clark opened the doors to The Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta.
The highly-acclaimed, nonprofit middle school has received both national and international recognition for its success in creating a supportive, dynamic learning environment that promotes academic excellence and fosters leadership. The Academy is also a demonstration school where visiting educators can observe and learn to incorporate Clark’s methodologies into their own classrooms. “We have 85 thousand educators who have been trained here so far and now those 85 thousand teachers are around the world in classrooms making it harder, making it more fun, building better relationships with kids, and we’ve shown them how to handle (tough) situations.” When Covid-19 shuttered schools, the RCA pivoted quickly to online teaching and shared their new methods with other educators. Over 200,000 teachers logged into the online training.
The impact of Clark’s methods is clearly visible with his Atlanta students and his pride is evident— “100% of our students for the last 13 years have graduated high school and 90% of our students are either in college or they’ve already graduated. They’re at some of the best colleges in the nation—Morehouse, Yale, Princeton, Spellman, Howard, Duke, Georgia Tech. We’ve had a great deal of success. We’ve shown our method works and we share it with other people.”
Adds Clark, “What we do is magical. We can change a life if we don’t give up and we don’t stop.”
