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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?
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.