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Stand and Deliver Teacher Jaime Escalante Dies
DesScorp writes "Jaime Escalante, the math teacher portrayed in the hit '80s movie Stand and Deliver, has died of cancer at age 79. Escalante is legendary for creating the advanced math 'pipeline' program at Garfield High in East Los Angeles in the '70s and '80s, an area populated mostly by poorer Hispanic families. Escalante's students eventually outpaced even richer schools in advanced placement tests for calculus. Escalante refused to accept excuses from his students or community about why they couldn't succeed, and demanded a standard of excellence from them, defying the notion that poor Hispanic kids just weren't capable of advanced work. While Escalante became a celebrity because of the hit movie about his efforts, jealousy from other teachers ... as well as red tape from teacher's unions and the public school bureaucracy, resulted in Escalante and his hand-picked teachers leaving Garfield. Since his departure, Garfield has never replicated Escalante's success with math students, and Reason Magazine reported on the shameful way in which others tore down what Escalante and his teachers worked so hard to build."
Also, some of you might have a passing interest in mathematics.
He was from Bolivia. Hispanic != Mexican.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It would be hard to overstate the impact Escalante has made on the education reform movement in the U.S. He and Rafe Esquith were the first to prove very publicly and definitively that demography is not destiny and that inner-city kids, with great teaching and high expectations, could achieve at high levels.
At his peak, Escalante had 187 students at one time sitting for the Calculus AP exam — and his students accounted for ONE-THIRD of all Mexican-Americans passing the exam in the country.
>>Public schools are not about education, its about creating dumbed down automatons who are easily controlled.
You know it's funny. I work teaching teachers technology, and I can't recall ever hearing a teacher say they really wished their kids would all be dumbed down automatons. Instead, you hear them all sharing positive stories about a kid that gets engaged with the subject matter and starts thinking on his own. Except for some really burned out teachers, this is pretty much universally true. They ALL want kids interested in a subject, capable of critical and independent thought, and being successful in life (ideally by going to college).
Now - inter-teacher rivalries and jealousies? Sure, I'll believe in that explanation as to why they undid the program at Garfield. But losing your entire cadre of teachers trained in his method probably had more to do with it than anything.
The only bit that I will agree with you in this regard is that schools tend to be very socially conservative institutions (by this I don't mean politically conservative, like Republicans, but rather resistant to change). AAA teachers tend to get kicked out of the system. I had Jan Gabay as my English teacher for the 9th and 12th grades - she was Teacher of the Year for the entire country in 1990-something, did a year traveling the country speaking on teaching, went back to Serra High for a couple years, and has since quit public schools to teach at the UC San Diego Charter School.
I also had Rick Halsey (IIRC, grandson of Admiral Bull Halsey) as a bio an AP Bio teacher, was an amazing teacher who took us into the canyons near the school to study actual plants and animals in the chaparral ecosystem. Every year he took his students on a week-long trip during Spring Break to go kayaking down the Colorado River or hiking in Anza Borrego, etc. He quit because the school was worried he was exposing them to too much liability risk.
Our system right now is rather dysfunctional. But teachers want kids to succeed - they don't want to produce dumb automatons. It's no longer the 1800s where we need to prep kids for work in the mills - "21st Century Skills" and all that is the current paradigm in education.
Schools do not just appear. They take a great deal of financing and legal paperwork. Your dream of grassroots school systems sprouting up is fantastically misguided.
Yes, vouchers help some parents place their students into better schools. Undoubtedly. But what you are breezing over is the effect this has on the other students who aren't quite so lucky. When considering educational models, you need to give attention to all students - not just the bright ones. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and all that. That is where vouchers fail.
Because public schools aren't an invitation for indoctrination? What you're saying is, you don't want them being indoctrinated with things you don't like. In other words, you're just another control freak.
Hardly.
The difference between public schools and home schooling in this case is that there is much more scrutiny in a public school. Though indoctrination most certainly happens in schools, it can at least be identified and handled, either through the media or in the courts - often both.
If you can identify a mechanism in homeschooling which prevents Mr. Smith from telling his child that evolution is a lie from the devil and that the world is 6000 years old, I'd be glad to entertain the idea in a more serious light. But until then, public school is the lesser of two evils.