Escalante Stood and Delivered. It's Our Turn

Wall Street Journal ^ | April 2, 2010 | ANDREW J. COULSON

[reaganaut1]

Jaime Escalante, the brilliant public school teacher immortalized in the 1988 film, "Stand and Deliver," died this week at the age of 79. With the help of a few dedicated colleagues at Garfield High in East Los Angeles, he shattered the myth that poor inner-city kids couldn't handle advanced math. At the peak of its success, Garfield produced more students who passed Advanced Placement calculus than Beverly Hills High.

In any other field, his methods would have been widely copied. Instead, Escalante's success was resented. And while the teachers union contract limited class sizes to 35, Escalante could not bring himself to turn students away, packing 50 or more into a room and still helping them to excel. This weakened the union's bargaining position, so it complained.

By 1990, Escalante was stripped of his chairmanship of the math department he'd painstakingly built up over a decade. Exasperated, he left in 1991, eventually returning to his native Bolivia. Garfield's math program went into a decline from which it has never recovered. The best tribute America can offer Jaime Escalante is to understand why our education system destroyed rather than amplified his success—and then fix it.

A succinct diagnosis of the problem was offered by President Clinton in 1993 at the launch of philanthropist Walter Annenberg's $500 million education reform challenge. "People in this room who have devoted their lives to education," he said, "are constantly plagued by the fact that nearly every problem has been solved by somebody somewhere, and yet we can't seem to replicate it everywhere else." Our greatest challenge is to create "a system to somehow take what is working and make it work everywhere."

The most naïve approach has been to create a critical mass of exemplary "model" schools, imagining that the system would spontaneously reconstitute itself

[Martel1971]

Thank you. I also teach, and this is what we need, more conservative teachers.

[A_perfect_lady]

You know, I’ve been a Freeper longer than I’ve been a teacher, but the one thing about Free Republic that bothers me is the relentless teacher-bashing. Our society is in the state it’s in because most conservatives have abandoned public education to the neo-marxist crowd. I wish more Freepers would enter the fight instead of just sneering from the sidelines.