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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."
I'm going to cry. Really.
I had the blessing to meet Mr. Escalante just a few months ago, before he was diagnosed with cancer. What a wonderful, wonderful man.
They should name schools after people like him.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
Yes, my cousin Juana was one of his students, indirectly. She went on to major in math at Cal and ended up graduating magna cum laude. Whenever you ask her about her academic career, the first person she points to is Escalante.
Juana tell us more about her and her experiences in Escalante's class?
He was played in a movie by the guy from Blade Runner *and* Battlestar Galactica.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's no wonder he got lots of resistance against his peers, administration and teachers union. Public schools are not about education, its about creating dumbed down automatons who are easily controlled.
"I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers." - John D. Rockefeller
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
To hell with them? No, to hell with social Darwinism.
Technically, Mexico and Bolivia are both American.
And as we all know, "technically correct" is the best kind.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
East Los Angeles, not New York, was the real Jaime-town.
He was from Bolivia. Hispanic != Mexican.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
His case is an interesting one in the Nature vs. Nurture argument. He showed that, by nature, inner city hispanic kids were just as capable at advanced studies as anyone else -- it simply required a mixture of blasting the old nurture ("You'll never be good enough to be something like an engineer, so why don't you just open a restaurant, work construction, or run a shop?") with discipline, attention, expectation, and teaching.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Escalante's example is nearly opposite of what you're proposing. It's about someone caring enough about OTHERs and improving their situation dramatically.
You on the other hand are barking up the "people should just help themselves" tree.
People tend to live up to other people's expectations. Teachers don't expect Black and Hispanic students to do well. Yes, ultimately people are responsible for their own success or failure, but it doesn't help when you've got teachers telling young kids "It doesn't matter if you do your homework or not -- we'll promote you anyway" (and yes, my ethnic daughter was actually told this by her teacher -- the same teacher that threatened to sue me for complaining she wasn't doing her job.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
What I want to know is if she is merry!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I've never understood why the left, which has supported the idea of a single-payer health care system, can't get its head around vouchers, which amount to a single-payer education system. No, a voucher system isn't perfect; yes, there will be abuses. But look at the ongoing train wreck of a system we have now!
In a voucher system, Jaime Escalante would have been massively successful, probably at the top of an organization teaching thousands of students. So what if some fundamentalists use their vouchers to send their kids to religious schools? Vouchers would finally give us a way to end the culture of mediocrity that has such a death grip on our schools now.
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
That doesn't speak highly of your intelligence.
Maybe a good place to spell out what you are talking about, rather than relying on "this".
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
one thing that caught by eye:
Open Enrollment. Escalante did not approve of programs for the gifted, academic tracking, or even qualifying examinations. If students wanted to take his classes, he let them.
His open-door policy bore fruit. Students who would never have been selected for honors classes or programs for the gifted chose to enroll in Escalante's math enrichment classes and succeeded there.
it hints perhaps that the drive to try is far more important than natural ability.
So true. And it's sad your post got modded down as Troll, since you are 100% right on, and whoever did that is probably caught up in the ideology behind monstrosity that is modern schooling (of course, most private schools are little better). Escalante failed to make large changes and was taken down by the institution because, ultimately, he was doing what should not be done in schools -- get poor people to think and climb out of their assigned class in life. More supportive links:
Gatto:
"Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling"
http://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Curriculum-Compulsory-Schooling/dp/086571231X
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
"""
Illich:
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm
http://reactor-core.org/deschooling.html
John Holt:
http://www.holtgws.com/
Collections of links by me on this:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
Why not just give the school money directly to the parents as they see fit to take care of their children? One proposal (by me):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
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.
I think Carlos Mencias pointed this out before. If you are hispanic and live in L.A. you are Mexican.
Why would anyone be surprised? Look at the racial makeup of California. Except for a few pockets of whites in Northern California, the state is almost overrun with Blacks and Mexicans.
While I know the poster was trolling, his comments are in stark contrast to Escalante's own work: anyone, regardless of skin color or income, can better themselves if they're willing to work hard enough and dedicate themselves in the long run. Escalante proved it, and he proved it with student AP calculus scores eventually outpacing even the very rich schools like Beverly Hills. It's shameful that some of his own fellow teachers thought he was being "cruel" to Hispanic kids by expecting excellence, and that he was risking their "self-esteem". Well, those teachers chased him off, and now I wonder how high the esteem of those students is now that they're no longer reaching the academic heights that Escalante took them to?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
subsidizing those who already send their children to parochial schools.
The parents of the kids in parochial school pay twice: once for their own kids' tuition, once again for their neighbors' kids via the school and property taxes. The typical voucher plan doesn't "force a taxpayer to pay for religious education," it allows a taxpayer to pay for what he actually uses.
Meanwhile, if all the kids who were in parochial school were to leave parochial school and enter the public system (into which their parents had already paid their share) that public system would collapse. Even with the "extra money" coming in from the parents of the kids who are not educated publicly, the public system is on the verge of financial, educational, and architectural collapse. You should thank God (erm, sorry) every day that the "religious kids" are not in the public system; the public system couldn't handle it.
You can't force people to learn. Escalante's gift was his power to inspire others to improve their own education. He didn't do the work for them -- he just convinced them that he believed they could do it, and that it was worthwhile. Let's not kid ourselves; these kids worked their asses off to pass the Calculus AP exam. They couldn't have been so successful if it wasn't the most important thing in their lives at that time. The ability to make people believe in a better future through hard work -- that seems to be a element that is sadly lacking in the current Republican talking points.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Someone else probably said that first.
You, uh, might want to reread my post. Don't just stop when you begin to get angry at what you think I'm saying. Read the last paragraph.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I personally know a man who has run a private school for 40+ years. Where he lives, there used to be a voucher program. Many private schools went through the hoops to restructure to qualify. In then end, the schools that accepted the vouchers had to close.
Why? Well, eventually the voucher program was brought to court. The schools had grown dependent on the voucher program. The families had grown dependent. When the money was gone, they all had to shut down. Except for the schools which had avoided the voucher program.
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
The flip side, is that the students that didn't want to be there, weren't. I remember many kids in High School that disrupted class because they didn't want to be there.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Let's just give the school money directly to the parents instead of schools, as I suggest here in some detail: :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities.
"Towards a Post-Scarcity New York State of Mind (through homeschooling)"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
"""
New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators
"""
We should also implement a basic income (social security and medicare for all, without age limits or a means test) for everyone as a human right, while we are at it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
If every person got a basic income, everyone could afford to purchase the education they wanted from the market.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
What about shortening names. Mexico is technically the United Mexican States, but the name is almost always shortened to Mexico. The US is the only country on either continent with America in it's name. Following the rules of every other country on earth is to drop adjectives or nous like republic or statesand the remaining word is your short name. For almost all these nations the people are given a term that derives from that word.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Probably by sheer stubbornness with a modicum of authority. There's a big lesson in Highschool about getting the system to do what you want. Turns out most of the time, the people whose job it is to say no will say yes if you're stubborn enough and have at least some plausible argument.
This is why weighting AP grades is awful. At least 25% of the people in my AP classes were there solely because it offered a 5.0 for an A and a 4.0 for a B. It even got worse, when the kids who took all the AP classes ended up having a GPA above 4.0 -- meaning any non-AP class they took would actually *lower* their GPA, regardless of what grade they got. So yes -- open door policy, but you shouldn't provide an incentive for people who don't want to learn to take the class.
Indeed, they were much too effective in facilitating actual learning to be useful in a modern teaching environment. The system works!
Seriously raises questions - this one time I wrote a loop and used i as the iterator. Later on I was working on a program from one of the other guys and found out that son of a bitch STOLE my code and used the SAME DAMN ITERATOR NAME.
Bunch of savages.
+1 Disagree
it hints perhaps that the drive to try is far more important than natural ability.
Disagree with you Yoda does.