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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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
If you thought that, then you'd be petitioning for childless people to be exempt from property tax. Public schools spread the burden across all. Their status as a parent or not is irrelevant, so they don't "pay twice" for the same thing. They pay once for educating everyone, before and after they have children, and the point is that an educated populous is productive. Regardless of whether they have kids, that's the goal of that. Second, once they do have kids, they have the choice of enrolling them for free into the institutions set up that they vote on. If they are so bad, why aren't they voting in better people? Why aren't they involved in the decision process? Instead, they want to take their ball and go home.
But the problem is that the voucher systems I've seen are all designed not to help children, but to provide tax cuts for the rich and harm anyone in public schools (while not improving private schools at all). If you've seen one that doesn't do this, please enlighten me.
Vouchers should be made available. And any school that takes a voucher should be required to take vouchers for payment-in-full and be required to take all applicants. But that'll never happen because the people against vouchers won't see what good they can do when done right (because they can do lots of harm when done wrong) and those that want them don't want to help the kids, but they want a tax break and to harm the public schools.
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If you thought that, then you'd be petitioning for childless people to be exempt from property tax. Public schools spread the burden across all. Their status as a parent or not is irrelevant, so they don't "pay twice" for the same thing. They pay once for educating everyone, before and after they have children, and the point is that an educated populous is productive.
Exactly. I find it far more rational to stop thinking about "my" taxes. I'm not purchasing individual goods with taxes. Whether I drive a car or not has little impact on the need for roads, as an example. There are certain needs we have as a society (I would include public education in that), and that is what "our" taxes are for. It stops being "your" money when you make your contribution to those social necessities via taxation.
You're free to argue that there is waste in our system, or that tax money goes to things that are not contributive to societal living, or that the tax law is imbalanced in some way, but none of that changes the fact that the tax money is not yours to be used solely on the parts of group living that you feel you take advantage of.
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
Now, onto your false assertions. The widespread belief that schools are paid for via property tax is false not only in my state but in many. Income and sales taxes account for the majority of funding for schools, and a majority portion of the remainder is from the federal government - which is not collecting property tax (yet). Funding from property tax is a small portion of school system funding. Thus, your assertion that it is "shared equally" is false on the face. Thus, it really is the "rich" paying for it.
Non sequitur. I never claimed that they were distributed equally. In fact, even if just property tax, it would be progressive because rich use more land than the poor. So "equally" was stated by no one, and if I did use such wording it was to indicate that the burden was shared by all, not held to the same dollar amount.
The manner in which the funding is obtained is also irrelevant. The majority of property tax in some places goes to schools, and Texas claims that half of all school funding is "local" but I don't know if that would include federal grants given directly to local schools.
But none of that contradicts what I said. Please quote my assertion that's false which you addressed.
We don't want to harm the public schools, and they don't need any help in that department anyway. It is hypocritical (and possibly mean-spirited) to say that those who want to pay for their kids' education are just trying to have more money but those who want their kids' education to paid for by other people are somehow virtuous.
Again, a non sequitur. I explicitly stated that the act of "public education" is irrelevant to how a person educates their children or even whether they have any children at all. "Public education" is what you are being taxed for, not paying for the right to send your own children to public school.
Your argument is like saying that welfare is broken because the only ones who can afford to pay in are the people who aren't using it. The act of paying in and the act of using the service are unrelated (well, not necessarily for unemployment and SS, but for most all other services it's true). How can I say this to say it so that you understand my point? It was declared that having an educated populous was important, and as such, education is provided for free. That's irrelevant to what you do with your own children. One is a public need and the other is a private need. You don't petition to get your police taxes refunded because you bought a gun for yourself, or try to get a refund on the fire department taxes because you didn't have a fire that year. It's simply not done as a "you pay this in taxes, you get this benefit directly back." Not for schools. Not for the police. Not for the fire department. Not for welfare.
You've seen very few actual proposals on vouchers. I've never seen one that could be classified as a tax break for the rich. Why? All the proposals I've seen are a flat per-child amount, not tied to income at all.
Right. And none of them covered the price of the public education, not to mention the much higher price of a private education. So someone who is offered a voucher would still have to come up with money. For the private school I attended, the proposed vouchers for Texas would have covered less than 25% of the cost. And the private schools would have had the same autonimy as before, so they would do as they have done, take who was already enrolled and only fill the small (about 5%) drop out rate (drop out of the school, like moving and such, not actual drop out as in never finishing). So the only people who'd be able to use them would be the people going there already, and they were overwhelmingly rich.
It wasn't a "if you make more, you get more" scheme. But if you looked at who would actually be using the vouchers and the effect on their finances, it was a tax rebate for the rich.
Thus, we would have a "regressive" tax cut in the sen
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