Posted on 04/02/2010 7:05:51 AM PDT by 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
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Can we say that U N I O N demands, are in opposition to the needs of students?
My Daddy always spoke out against a “cult of mediocrity”. But today’s schools have gotten much worse than what he saw in his day.
May he rest in peace.
We know that money is not the answer. Many of our big cities spend more per capita on education than elsewhere in the country. I heard Wash. DC was at the very top. But, for spending the most money, these school districts are getting some of the worst results. Yet, liberal apologists continually demand more “resources” for these failing schools. When they are already getting more money than successful schools elsewhere, how can this be? Isn’t this a disconnect?
You know a movie showing him being stripped of his chair of mathmetics and going back to Bolivia would be better than the ultimately false “Stand and Deliver.” Ultimately false because it shows hope and victory for the inner city public school and their students, when the reality was a battle won and ultimate loss of the war.
I didn’t like the movie because it didn’t ring true to me. Now I know why — they left out the ending.
The education establishment wants the inner city students to fail. It is a deliberate effort to maintain an uneducated (I refer to real education, not the phony “self esteem” bovine scat) underclass, made up of members of minority “permanent victims”. Yes, the liberals like to throw around the term racist at any one who disagrees with them, however their very actions in inner city schools are racist themselves. And of course these liberal elitists send their own kids to the best private schools.
This is even worse than the nomenklatura in the Soviet Union.
Homeschoolers should get a ping to this. I don’t know who to ping though.
I am pinging metmom.
Remember that Escalante would be teaching to 50 kids who WANTED to be in his class. Were clamouring for it. Motivated kids like that, you CAN put 50 to a room. But 50 who don’t want to be there because they already expect society to take care of them all their lives are a different kettle of fish.
‘...liberal apologists continually demand more “resources” for these failing schools...”
Thomas Sowell’s INSIDE AMERICAN EDUCATION is still the classic on this subject.
I’ve often argued that the average sixth grader of rural Alabama depression-era schools could write a better paragraph than most public high school graduates today (based upon limited anecdotal samples but I bet more samples would substantiate the superiority of those 6th graders).
PING 4 LATER
50 who don’t want to be there because they already expect society to take care of them all their lives are a different kettle of fish.
All too true, and that all changed with reduced discipline taking teacher out of that equation, by whiney parents and the political correct. I remember the 16 year old or two or three in Junior High just waiting to get out. They were invariably the trouble makers.
Maybe. But it's undeniably true that real 'education' takes a back seat to just about every other facet of school district operations. Most of the money goes to things that can't really be justified. Astroturf for the football field. A pool for the swim team. A renovated wing of a building that is less than 20 years old. New computers for this classroom or that (a real treadmill if I ever saw one). And I haven't even addressed the teachers' unions and their demands. Heck, if it were only that we'd be able to manage the situation.
You found the KEY. A single DEDICATED teacher can teach 50 students who WANT to be in that class and WANT to learn all they can and DO learn all they can.
A teacher TODAY cannot teach 15 students who DO NOT want to be there, have NO interest in learning, won’t study or do homework, pass their time texting or worse, if they even went to school today.
If their teacher pushes the issue, he/she is pounced upon by an administration and school board adhering to “political correctness” and fearful of losing a handful of votes.
The movie Stand and Deliver was made in 1988, Escalante lost his chairmanship in 1990 and left in 1991. So unless the producers had a time machine, there was no way to include that in the movie.
I wsan’t saying anything bad about the producers. We wouldn’t even know about this if it wasn’t for them. It’s just that the movie ultimately protrayed an America that doesn’t exist — one where one man can change the system and hope exists even for kids in the inner city. That was indeed the 1980’s. In the 1990’s and 2000’s, that man is demoted and leaves for Bolivia as this obituary informs us . . . and I saw the movie for the first time probably in the 2000’s on TV.
Tell me about it. I teach public school in downtown Los Angeles.
My conclusions are based on observations of the Newark NJ public school system (notably Central High) while attending college in Newark in the seventies. Any student who dared break from the pack and learn something was essentially called a race traitor - by the school administration.
Thus the school administrations want the students to fail, using the so-called excuses of “poverty and racism” burdens being impossible to overcome. The same line is being pushed at University of Minnesota school of education, where the students are REQUIRED to sign on to what amounts to this leftist political orthodoxy. So, by crying “racism”, the leftist educational establishment practices racism by holding the inner city students down.
This is a movie that needs a sequel.
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