Stand and Deliver Teacher Jaime Escalante Dies 389
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."
Re:Yeah haters, this *is* News for Nerds (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Truly (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Shining Example (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe a good place to spell out what you are talking about, rather than relying on "this".
Some of his achievements (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Rest in peace. (Score:3, Informative)
... In retirement, he divided his time between California and Bolivia, where he complained that several schools were named after him but had given him no money for the rights.
One reason why they usually wait until someone dies to name something after the person.
As an aside, Purdue University was named after John Purdue, and not only did the state of Indiana not pay him anything for the name, he had to bequeath many acres of land to get them to put his name on it.
Re:Rest in peace. (Score:3, Informative)
So it'd be better if it came from a pseudo-communist Democratic shilling rags?
Reason has been named one of the best english language magazines twice in the last 10 years.
I work in K-12 education and have for the last 15 years, sorry to burst your bubble but it takes a moderate or right-wing news source to critically look at public education, the Unions and administration. Reason will look at it, so might the Atlantic but the New York Times sure isn't going to.
Re:Rest in peace. (Score:3, Informative)
http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/obama-takes-on-the-teacher-unions/
Oh really? [nytimes.com]
From the first paragraph:
President Obama gets an A+ for his education speech just now. He made all the traditional and necessary points that one would expect a progressive Democrat to make — such as the crucial necessity of more early childhood programs — but he also added elements that will make teachers’ unions uncomfortable. And, frankly, that’s terrific. The Democratic Party has been too close to the unions for too long, and their interest is not precisely the same as the students’. The unions would be failing their members if they didn’t cry foul when bad teachers were pushed out, but that’s what we need more of. Education reform is going to mean challenging the unions, and Obama signaled that that’s what he plans to do.
And that's not really the only opinion piece you can find from the New York Times that is critical of the teacher's unions.
Re:Public schools (Score:5, Informative)
>>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.
Re:Why I still think we need vouchers (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Way to miss my point completely, dude (Score:3, Informative)
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.
One bizarre danger of vouchers (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:"Racial Makeup" (Score:3, Informative)
Sort of. From TFA, it appears that on top of Escalante's skill at teaching, he was also a good organizer and coach. He developed a system and an infrastructure to get the students the basic skills they needed and to allow them to continue along. Even if you're willing to work hard, if you don't have an environment that supports the work and allows it to grow, then it's going to be the extraordinarily rare individual that can succeed.
What he did was much more akin to developing a successful sports program than an academic program. He had to coach his players to get the best out of them, but he couldn't do it on his own. He needed other teachers to help develop basic skills and and, essentially, money to pay for rooms, equipment, etc. As a country, we seem to understand the sports franchise analogy and support it with enormous resources (money). Corporations and donors give professional and collegiate sports franchises big bucks (basically in hopes of advertising exposure).
Let's work this through.... Corporate sponsorship of academic programs. IBM math teams. Barnes and Nobel language programs. Microsoft, ummm, ethics courses. That's the ticket.
Re:Rest in peace. (Score:2, Informative)
No, unlike Limbaugh who uses them as a scapegoat all the time I picked them because they have a long history of loving the unions, communism and giving cheap ad rates to radicals like Moveon.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_The_New_York_Times [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_york_times#Controversy_and_criticism [wikipedia.org]
And once more, opinion pieces are just that, opinion pieces or blogs that aren't the official editorial stance or focus of the paper.
Find me a NYT story that is critical of NEA and the major state teacher unions and I'll apologize for defaming the "Newspaper of Record."
Re:Why I still think we need vouchers (Score:4, Informative)
The existence and history of the homeschooling movement indicates very much to the contrary. What is a homeschooling household, but a grassroots school sprouted up around a single family? A properly designed voucher system would encourage groups of parents, when they feel they have no better alternative, to homeschool their kids together. That's a school! The vouchers would help with the cost of educational materials, and what more is needed?
I would not trust such a system like homeschooling to objectively and effectively educate most children. Relying on parents is an invitation for indoctrination and intellectual inbreeding. Forget teaching kids about skills that aren't already developed in adults, much less the ability to cope with different environments and alternative viewpoints.
You seem to have absorbed the idea that education is something that comes only from large institutions. The truth is, education is a thoroughly individual activity that requires nothing but access to information and to people who already understand that information. In this Internet age, those things are more readily available than ever.
No, I've absorbed the idea that people who have achieved a modicum of qualification are better suited to instruct our youth than parents who have a vested interest in protecting children from the scary world outside their home.
Re:Why I still think we need vouchers (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Why I still think we need vouchers (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why I still think we need vouchers (Score:2, Informative)
Go read actual wording of the Constitution. Religion is only mentioned twice:
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the
several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of
the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or
Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be
required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United
States.
Okay, so there's no religious test required for public office, nothing relating to schools here.
Amendment 1
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or
of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition
the Government for a redress of grievances.
Okay, so congress cannot make a law about the establishment of a religion or prohibit people from worshiping their religion.
That's it. There's nothing else in there about the separation of church and state.
How then does this translate into public dollars not being able to be spent by parents on religious schools if they so choose? The government isn't establishing religious schools or enforcing the use of religious schools. They aren't even directly funding religious schools. How is this any different from someone taking their economic stimulus check and deciding to donate it to a church? or using state-funded insurance at a religious hospital?
By the way, I'm an atheist. Though I do live in the southeastern US, so almost everyone around me is Christian.