Posted on 10/15/2016 2:21:21 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
In 1974, Jamie Escalante took a job at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, California. He found himself in a challenging situation: teaching math to Hispanic students at a rundown school known for violence and drugs. While many dismissed his students as unteachable, Escalante pushed them to reach their potential. He started an advanced mathematics program with a handful of students. He was so successful a testing service accused his students of cheating. They weren’t. Hollywood made a fine movie out of the story called “Stand and Deliver” (1988).
Escalante’s students were the last ones expected to succeed academically but Escalante told them: “I'll teach you math and that's your language. With that you're going to make it. You're going to college and sit in the first row, not the back, because you're going to know more than anybody."
He was harassed by the usual nitwits in the Education Establishment. They said he came to work too early, he stayed too late, his standards were too high, he was attempting the impossible. What good could come of that?
Escalante (1930-2010) is, to put it simply, one of this country’s finest teachers. He was a great man. It’s an honor to read about him. Everyone should know about his work. If you are moved by nobility, steadiness of purpose, success achieved against overwhelming odds, this guy's story will make you cry.
Needless to say, the Education Establishment should have adopted his ideas and used them throughout the country. Instead, administrators tried to limit his influence and make him go away.
Escalante shared a lot in common with that other great maverick, John Saxon They had all the good ideas. The Education Establishment hated them for this. Anyone serious about improving a school should seek inspiration from Saxon and Escalante.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Public schools administrators are the most evil of all.
Their souls are pitch black.
Escalante and Saxon were heroes. IMHO. They achieved “the impossible” that others just shrank from.
Why do you think Trump’s school choice is hitting a chord in African American communities? Because they are sick and tired of having failed schools and Trump is the only one who wants to give them the tools necessary to escape the education cabal that is poising their kids for a lifetime
His secret was that he created, with the cooperation of a set of middle school teachers, a “tracking” system to identify talented kids, separate them out from the mass and teach them to a high standard where they would not be held back by the need to pander to their incapable peers. These kids he would also “track” through High School till they could take the Calculus APs.
It worked very well of course, as this is what most of the world does. This was no great innovation, conceptually. Its whats done even in Escalante’s native Bolivia. It did take guts to do it in the US.
His system found and developed talent that would have been overlooked. The system hates tracking, it is ideologically repugnant to it, and would rather waste talent than admit their ideas are wrong.
K-12 can easily be done at home online through programmed instruction and online exams. There is no need for this giant, wasteful educational infrastructure that has evolved into nothing more than Youth Indoctrination Centers and jobs programs for Democrat loyalists.
true - but tracking very much exists in gov’t schools these days to those children fortunate to have interested parents. All sorts of magnet programs teach to decent standards. The tragedy is these magnet schools are the exception not the rule.
Trump’s approach to;
1) eliminate federal dept. of education
2) encourage massive expansion of non-Union charter schools
is great
“There is no need for this giant, wasteful educational infrastructure...”
... unless, of course, one is a communist. Then it is absolutely essential.
It did not randomly evolve into this; it was engineered to be this way.
Charters are all very well, but those alone wont do what Escalante did.
That takes the resources and population pool of a large school district. This is a system, not happenstance of having aware parents.
To see how its done, one has to go abroad.
Tracking (and it is done, officially and more usually, as in Escalantes case, unofficially) in the US is way too dependent on circumstance.
Curiously, communist countries education systems were not at all like those of the US.
They actually believed in individual talent, sought it out and developed it. They did have strong academic tracking.
They did force a bunch of stupid political philosophy down the kids throats, but they certainly did teach math and literature very well.
Soviet teachers and administrators would consider the US system and its guiding philosophy as fanatical and idiotic.
Under common core and its ugly son ESSA I’m thinking what he did might just be impossible in today’s education morass.
More than a year ago, Trump promised to cancel Common Core. He said that all education should be more local.
That’s when I knew he was a most unusual politician and I started rooting for him.
( Jeb Bush went right on supporting Common Core a year ago; and I knew he was finished. People want more choice, more competition, more control, more of everything that the Education Establishment doesn’t want them to have.)
It is an article of faith with the Left, that everyone is equally capable of learning, and that there is no significant genetic component of IQ. If you dare to disagree, then you're a fascist, and they will destroy you.
Escalante's great sin, for which he was never forgiven, was to demonstrate that there ARE people who are born more talented than others.
“It worked very well of course, as this is what most of the world does. This was no great innovation, conceptually. Its whats done even in Escalante’s native Bolivia. It did take guts to do it in the US.”
It was used in the U.S. up until the 1980s. It probably is used still in some places. I was educated in that system.
Yes, it is repugnant to the current leftist ideologues, but it was considered nearly mandatory by the 1950s/60s “progressives”.
Agreed. If participation in sports could be incorporated therein, it’d be a winner.
I think his greatest sin was to prove that the system was letting down Chicano and Central American kids (nearly all of his students were hispanic). And grossly letting them down, by failing even in their supposed mission of uplifting the underclass.
That was a political slap in the face.
To destroy a mind takes two steps:
1) ruin their psycho-epistemology by emphasizing self expression, conformity to the group, feelings, imagination, and social adjustment instead of conceptualization, integration, reason, and expanding understanding.
2) ruining content by emphasizing anti-rational indoctrination, repetition, and concrete bound associations
A great movie about a great teacher. We often quoted that teacher when our family was growing up.
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