GRAD2B SALUTES – JAIME ESCALANTE, Teacher

Posted by ERUDIO in Inspiration on Mar 31st, 2010

Can any one individual change our big wide world for the better? Our GRAD2B “Salute Series”recognizes great educators and entrepreneurs from all periods of history, from all nations, and from all walks of life. These individuals— not necessarily professors or teachers themselves— are those who have raised the quality of life of humanity, through education. Some are immensely wealthy, some poor, some renowned, some obscure. They have one thing in common: their pivotal roles in improving the lives of others, through moral will, personal influence, and self-sacrifice. It all begins with knowledge. And ends in caring.

Jaime Escalante

A great man is gone. He was not wealthy. He was not political. Yet he was great. For he had the power to change lives.

Jaime Escalante— the math teacher who rescued the tough students of a East L. A. high school, and inspired the movie “Stand and Deliver”— has died at his son’s home, near Sacramento.

Escalante was 79, and had fought bladder cancer for years— with the same courage that he had fought ignorance and despair in his years of teaching.

An immigrant from Bolivia, he revolutionized Garfield High School. Escalante inspired and drove struggling students, to learn A.P. math and science. They not only learned, they achieved. I

In 1982, testing officials made Garfield students retake the A.P. tests. So many of Escalante’s students passed, that the officials believed they had to be cheating. Escalante’s students were retested, and all passed again!

Eventually, Garfield school sent an incredible number of advanced placement calculus students to college— only four other public high schools, in the entire USA, sent more.

Edward James Olmos played Escalante in the beloved film, based on his story. Olmos said, “Jaime exposed one of the most dangerous myths of our time — that inner city students can’t be expected to perform at the highest levels. Because of him, that destructive idea has been shattered forever.”

A close friend of Escalante’s has described how Escalante was a teacher in La Paz, before he emigrated to the U.S. Escalante had to study English at night— for years— to get his California teaching credentials, and return to the classroom. The friend said that at first Escalante was deeply discouraged, by Garfield’s “culture of low expectations, gang activity and administrative apathy.”

But Escalante loved kids, and he was no quitter. Neither the gangs, nor the school administrators could stop him.

Ultimately, Escalante totally reinvented the school’s math curriculum. He won the hearts and minds of those who at last put their faith in him. He earned their respect and inspired their own self-confidence.

And working-class Mexican-American students (considered unteachable) eventually mastered even the brutal A.P. calculus tests!

One student, Elsa Bolado, 45, passed the AP calculus test in 1982. She is now an elementary school teacher and trainer, remembers Escalante’s charisma. He built her confidence with long hours of solving problems.

Escalante inspired Bolado to become an educator in her own right. She said, “To this day, I still think of the example he set… the study skills, how not to give up, I revert back to that every time things get rough.”

Bolado said, “Teaching is an art form. There’s a lot of practitioners and very few artists. He was a master artist.”

And as Jaime Escalante himself said, “One of the greatest things you have in life is that no one has the authority to tell you what you want to be. You’re the one who’ll decide what you want to be. Respect yourself and respect the integrity of others as well. The greatest thing you have is your self image, a positive opinion of yourself. You must never let anyone take it from you!”

Jamie Escalante… we salute you, and your gift to the hope and the dream of education, itself.