Jaime Escalante

Jaime Escalante grew up in La Paz, Bolivia, the son of two teachers, and taught math and physics there for twelve years before he ever set foot in an American classroom. When he and his family immigrated to the United States, his Bolivian credentials meant nothing on paper: he worked ordinary jobs, taught himself English, and earned an entirely new college degree before anyone would let him teach again. He landed in 1974 at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, a campus with gang activity in the hallways and almost no institutional expectation that its students could handle advanced mathematics. He nearly quit and asked for his old job back before deciding to try anyway, starting with twelve students willing to sit for basic algebra.

Escalante built a calculus program from nothing, against a school bureaucracy that mostly wanted him to stop. His first Advanced Placement calculus class, in 1978, had five students; two passed the exam. He kept building, helped after a change in leadership by a principal who reorganized the school's academic track around him, and by 1987 eighty-three of his students passed the standard AP exam and twelve passed the harder version, extraordinary numbers for any school, let alone one the district had all but written off. Along the way, in 1982, the Educational Testing Service flagged eighteen of his students' passing scores as suspicious over shared errors; fourteen agreed to retake the exam, and all fourteen passed again, a vindication that became the emotional center of a book and then a film built around his classroom.

The 1988 film Stand and Deliver made Escalante famous, and he said himself it got about ninety percent of the story right, but the ten percent it compressed left out the cost. His classes had grown past fifty students, well over his teachers' union's cap of thirty-five, and the workload and the resentment it created among colleagues never really eased. He left Garfield in 1991 citing faculty politics and what he called petty jealousies, not triumph, and finished his American teaching career at a high school in Sacramento that never became a movie. The program he had built at Garfield did not survive his departure at the scale he had built it, a detail the inspirational version of the story tends to leave out.

He returned to Bolivia in 2001 to teach at a university in Cochabamba, then came back to the United States near the end of his life for treatment of the bladder cancer that killed him in 2010, at seventy-nine, near Sacramento. Washington had already recognized him with the Presidential Medal for Excellence in Education in 1988, and the National Teachers Hall of Fame inducted him in 1999; an asteroid and a postage stamp followed. His real afterlife is definitional: the Escalante story became national shorthand for the argument that poverty and low expectations, not ability, were what kept students out of advanced math, a claim harder to dismiss once a classroom in East Los Angeles had already proven it.

Jaime Escalante's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Garfield High School AP Calculus program other
  Built from a five-student class into one of the country's largest AP calculus programs 1978
• Escalante: The Best Teacher in America book
  Jay Mathews' account of his classroom, published the same year as the film 1988
• Stand and Deliver film
  Dramatization of the 1982 AP cheating investigation and its aftermath 1988

• December 31, 1930 aged 0 Born in La Paz, Bolivia
• 1974 aged ~44 Begins teaching at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles
• 1978 aged ~48 Teaches his first AP Calculus class — five students, two pass
• 1982 aged ~52 Eighteen students' passing AP scores are flagged as suspicious; fourteen retake the exam and all pass
• 1987 aged ~57 Program peaks — 83 students pass the AB exam, 12 the BC exam
• 1988 aged ~58 Stand and Deliver is released, dramatizing his classroom
• 1991 aged ~61 Leaves Garfield for a Sacramento high school, citing faculty politics
• 2001 aged ~71 Returns to Bolivia to teach at a university in Cochabamba
• March 30, 2010 aged 79 Dies of bladder cancer near Sacramento, California

• Thurgood Marshall 1908–1993
  First African American Supreme Court Justice and lead attorney in Brown v. Board of Education. inspired by
• Wendy Kopp b. 1967
  Founder of Teach for America, which places college graduates as teachers in underserved schools. paralleled
• Booker T. Washington 1856–1915
  Educator and founder of Tuskegee Institute who advocated for vocational training for African Americans. succeeded the movement of