Dakota Beacon

With sadness we noted last week the passing of a remarkable man.  Jaime Escalante pursued a profession not usually linked with fame.  He was a high school math teacher.  Born in Bolivia, Escalante earned his teaching degree and at his wife’s urging, immigrated (legally!) to the United States.  He found himself in Los Angeles, in an economically depressed area overwhelmingly ethnically Hispanic. 

Upon perusing the teaching materials and textbooks, Escalante was dismayed.  The work expected of high school students in Los Angeles was taught at the 5th grade level back in Bolivia.  It made no sense to him to require less of these kids than he knew they could deliver, and he resolved to put himself and these students to the test.

The kids he was assigned to teach in his high school class offered little promise of glory.  Disadvantaged boys and repressed girls, most of whom had never dared to dream were his clay.  If you have not seen the movie, Stand and Deliver (1988), please do so.  This was Escalante’s story.  We need not recount the personal home dramas of these kids, the conflicts and the struggles.  Just watch the show.  It is mostly true.

Escalante believed in his pupils.  He not only believed they could succeed, but that they could excel.  He determined that they would sit for – and pass – the Advanced Placement Test in Calculus.  His fellow teachers reacted with hostility.  Here was this interloper trying to raise the bar.  Their objections were disguised as solicitation for these hopeless kids – why get their hopes up?  They can’t possibly do this.  The administration opposed him and, of course many parents objected because they didn’t dream either and couldn’t see the point in this extra work.  To make a long story short, despite two acute health crises and all of the resistance, Escalante and his class succeeded.  Because it was assumed that these kids couldn’t do it, they were accused of cheating, in a blatant manifestation of racism.  All but one of them took the exam over and were vindicated.  It is impossible to exaggerate how extraordinary was this accomplishment. 

“Nearly one-fourth of all Mexican Americans passing the Advanced Placement calculus exams nationwide at the time were from Jaime Escalante’s classes.” (Betrayal, 2004, Crown Forum, New York).  Sounds like a brilliant finish, doesn’t it?

Sadly, this isn’t how it ended.  It seems Escalante held himself and his colleagues to high standards as well.  When he saw teachers using their on-clock hours to deal in real estate or take time off on dishonest pretexts he reported it – he must have thought he should, not wanting to be an accessory to fraud.  As a result of this and of his shining success in teaching, he became the object of an intense campaign to be rid of him.  Teachers complained he had “too many students” in his classes.  When he finally was hounded out of his job, the union sent out a note – “We got him out.”  Isn’t that great?  What an accomplishment. Does it make you wonder what they could have achieved had they devoted this much attention to their students?

Escalante returned to Bolivia.  Last week he died in the United States, while visiting a son, of cancer.  A brilliant career, a dedicated public servant, an inspiration to hundreds of our most underprivileged.  It seems he gave America far more than he got.
And the most tragic aspect of this scenario is that it is not isolated.  The teachers unions do not want their members doing “more than their share” or going “above and beyond” the call of duty.  In fact, quite the contrary. Examples and standards like those of Jaime Escalante make other teachers either look bad or have to work a lot harder to keep up, and this is not what the NEA and AFT are all about.  They have their own agenda (see “Democrats’ Evil Twin”, Dakota Beacon, April, 2010).  It just doesn’t happen to have much to do with excellence in education.  The teachers’ unions benefit when performance is poor, in that this gives them the excuse to demand more money.

So, as we survey the landscape of our educational system in the Spring of 2010, what we see is very discouraging.  Our schools are used more for propaganda mills to instill socialism and Marxist thinking in students, to promote misguided “multiculturalism”, moral relativism, deviant sex and as a marketplace for Ritalin.  In other words, our children are being betrayed and their futures crippled by this failed system and the union forces behind it.

Years ago, when we began teaching our children to read, we investigated the best options available.  We used Samuel Blumenfeld’s Alphaphonics and then went to the McGuffey Readers.  When we looked at those it was impossible not to see the dramatic falling off of our culture and our education.  It is unlikely that many college seniors are will rise to the challenge of the level of the 5th and 6th Readers in the series.  Not only intellectually, but morally, these books (and presumably their contemporary competitors) were demanding and enriching. 

Once I bought an old book by Thomas Carlyle on Robert Burns, Burns being a favorite topic of my husband.  It was thoughtful, scholarly and the use of language was of a level of sophistication only rarely seen in contemporary writing.  Then I noted the stamp inside the front cover:  it had originally come from a rural North Dakota School in the 1890’s.  So a prairie school in a remote hamlet of North Dakota back in the 19th Century was provided more intellectual stimulation that most of our university humanities courses in 2010.  When you hear from one of our seniors that they have “only” and 8th grade education, think about what that meant at the time. 

The moral?  I would say that it is two-pronged.  The proof is there that the most disadvantaged American students can succeed spectacularly if encouraged and treated with the respect they deserve.  Also, we are failing to provide this in our public schools today and have accepted inferior standards – or none at all – as long as the proper indoctrination is carried out:  Earth Day, Day of Silence, “days” of one leftist cause after another are “celebrated”, while the Ten Commandments are absent and multiculturalism, as long as it is basically anti-American, hold sway at taxpayer expense.  It is time for vouchers or other tax relief for parents who wish to provide better schooling for their kids and we should encourage home school and correspondence school rather than throwing more money into the bottomless pit of public education.

Jaime Escalante, your life and career were not in vain!  Rest in the peace you deserve.