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:Truly (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Rest in peace. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:To hell with those who won't better themselves. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Truly (Score:2, Interesting)
But he educated the Hispanic poor community, which is why he would be an icon for them.
St. Patrick wasn't Irish, but is definitely an Irish icon.
Re:Truly (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Agreed, schools are for dumbing us down (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [amazon.com]
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt [newciv.org]
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm [johntaylorgatto.com]
"""
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 [infed.org]
http://reactor-core.org/deschooling.html [reactor-core.org]
John Holt:
http://www.holtgws.com/ [holtgws.com]
Collections of links by me on this:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html [listcultures.org]
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html [listcultures.org]
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html [listcultures.org]
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 [pdfernhout.net]
Re:Why I still think we need vouchers (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Rest in peace. (Score:3, Interesting)
... 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.
The Washington Post can be rather left leaning, but the education columnist, Jay Mathews, wrote a book on Jamie Escalante and often refers to his methods in his column. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/30/AR2010033003629.html?sid=ST2010033003904 [washingtonpost.com]
Re:Public schools (you'll never know) (Score:1, Interesting)
While you have a point, by your own logic, you'll never know how much happier your life or our society might have been if you had not been drilled for thirteen or more years in:
* only doing what someone in authority tells you to do;
* only socializing with people of a similar age, similar mental abilities, and similar social class;
* doing stuff no matter how stupid or pointless you thought it was just because some authority told you to do it or else;
* had more chances to think up your own things to do with people you picked;
* had more chances to work with both your hands and brain;
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?_r=1 [nytimes.com]
* and so on.
See New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto:
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt [newciv.org]
"""
Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes.
"""
See also his:
"State Controlled Consciousness"
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html [the-open-boat.com]
"""
If your kids do badly, it does not mean that they're bad readers or anything else. It means they haven't been obedient to the drills the state set down and they're marked for further treatment later on with a mark to be excluded from responsible jobs. Perhaps some way is to be excluded from the colleges that lead to responsible jobs, in other ways from the licenses that lead to responsible jobs.
This was ALL worked out. It didn't evolve by a lot of rational people saying we'll take this this and this from the past, then the next generation says we'll take this this and this. This was set down largely in a handful of places. Prussia was perhaps the most prominent of those places. The Prussian experiment leapt into the United States almost immediately in the 1840's. Leapt into the United States; its propagandists covered the country here. Its backers, its financial backers set up the most important teacher training institutes and then financed those institutes and then no one was allowed to become a teacher who didn't more or less subscribe to the fact that experts could create a curriculum and pedagogues could administer it.
Well, that's exactly what Horace, the Roman essayist, talked about in several of his essays. He said, "the master creates the lessons, the pedagogue (the teacher) administers the lessons." But if you find the teacher creating the lessons or deviating from the direction the lessons are headed in, you get rid of the pedagogue.
"""
And that last is part of what happened to Jaime Escalante. While he may not have understood the bigger picture, he deviated from the lessons, and was ultimately replaced, whatever the results.
As Gatto says at the end there:
"""
A lot of the constraints on us, a lot of the ah, ah - strings that hold us like puppets are really inventions of our own mind. I'm not saying that there aren't armies and police and various ways to punish deviants. But there isn't any way to punish a LARGE NUMBER of deviants. There isn't any way to do that. It's too expensive to even try to do that, unless you can colonize the minds of children
Re:Why I still think we need vouchers (Score:3, Interesting)
some students will be forced to attend those schools caught in that downward spiral
It's not like these schools are so great, some of them in the inner city have pretty much hit the bottom of the downward spiral, they really can't get much worse. The kids are already forced into those kinds of schools, with the system as it is now they have no real option to go somewhere else. At least with vouchers they will have the choice to attend a different school if they want to. Besides, if a school is really that bad, it should be shut down, and something else put in its place.
I'll tell you the real reason Democrats are against vouchers, and to find out, you have to follow the money [opensecrets.org]. Teachers unions are big donors to democrats, and teachers unions are opposed to voucher systems. The problem with teachers unions is that they are mostly interested in making life as good as possible for the teachers (as a union should), but they shouldn't be driving policy because school policy should be driven by what is best for the students.
Going beyond vouchers (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [pdfernhout.net]
"""
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 [wikipedia.org]
If every person got a basic income, everyone could afford to purchase the education they wanted from the market.
Re:Rest in peace. (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, it tried to leave some blame, as it was being written for a stridently anti-union publication, but all I see the writer saying is that the union wouldn't allow Escalante's successor to jam more than 35 students into his classes. Which I think is a good thing.
Re:Rest in peace. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Public schools (Score:3, Interesting)
If anyone working for Bill could actually think for themselves, they wouldn't be working for Bill.
I guess everyone who thinks for themselves thinks the same as you.
Of course not, but if they could think for themselves, they would see they are getting reamed working for a sociopath who produces inferior products and survives by being the most brutal, underhanded, and duplicitous fucker in the business. If his workers could think for themselves, they would see that they could do better NOT working for such a sociopath. But our public schools teach kids to kowtow to authority, not to question their 'betters,' and not to rock the boat.
But more importantly, people who can actually think for themselves (and are not sociopaths) participate as little as possible in a system that debases the working class who actually create all value, while raising the owning class up to the level of near godhood. Why would anyone work against their own interests participating in a system that enslaves them to owning class sociopaths?