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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."
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.
Also, some of you might have a passing interest in mathematics.
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.
As a leftist extremist, I've never been able to understand it either.
When I was volunteering at the Obama campaign office, this was probably my second biggest argument with most of my fellow workers, after nuclear power.
There have been some very bad voucher schemes proposed, which amount to nothing more than yet another tax break for wealthy people while shifting the burden to the poor.
But there have also been some good voucher schemes proposed. Something that would let parents send their children to any school, public or private, that they wanted, would be awesome. Something that would actually reduce the cost of expensive private schools for those who can't afford it would be great.
Getting the fundamentalist nutjobs out of the public schools and into their own little inbred communities where they can't do any harm to the rest of society would just be a bonus, as far as I'm concerned.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
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.
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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