Jaime Escalante, of "Stand and Deliver" film fame, died Tuesday March 30, 2010 from cancer at age 79. You may remember that Escalante's students passed the Advanced Placement Calculus AP exam. The odds were that there would not be even one student at that school taking and passing AP Calculus, perhaps the hardest course in American secondary education.

Garfield High School offered the worst possible conditions for learning: 85 percent of the students were low income, most of the parents were grade-school dropouts, faculty morale was bad, expectations were low.

So, what was Escalnate's secret? Here is what Jay Mathews, the Los Angeles bureau chief for The Washington Post from 1982 to 1987, wrote about what he saw:

"It took me several years to understand how Garfield's AP teachers, and the many educators who have had similar results in other high-poverty schools, pulled all this off. They weren't skimming. It wasn't a magic trick of test results. They simply had high expectations for every student. They arranged extra time for study -- such as Escalante's rule that if you were struggling, you had to return to his classroom after the final bell and spend three hours doing homework, plus take some Saturday and summer classes, too. They created a team spirit, teachers and students working together to beat the big exam. Escalante celebrated "ganas," a Spanish word that he said meant the urge to succeed. He was so convinced of the power of teaching that he lied to keep students with him. He said school rules forbade dropping his class. He told the parents of absent students that if he did not see their children in his classroom the next day, he would call the immigration authorities to check on their status." -- Exerted from Jay Mathews blog dated April 4, 2010.

Was it all because of Escalante and his wonderful, gifted teaching style? Maybe in the beginning, but I think that the 1) high expectations for every student, 2) extra time for study, 3) doing homework for three hours after school, 4) Saturday and summer classes, and 5) a team spirit, with teachers and students working together to beat the big exam. Can you believe that he actually expected them to work? Not just work for a few minutes to "complete the assignment", but to work for hours!

I have read recently that some parents and educators think that mandatory homework is tantamount to a sin. They seem to think that no practice nor review of the material is needed to fully comprehend and be able to use the information presented in classes. I wish that we had more "sinful" teachers like Escalante who assigned difficult homework and parents who supported those teachers in their efforts to teach. Parents who think, for whatever illogical reason, that their child does not need to do homework need to remember what it was like when they were in school.

The idea that it takes hard work for most of us to learn something is the basic concept of this website. Learning takes work, and only a few gifted people can skip the steps of study, practice, and yes, memorize needed to be successful in school. No amount of magic wand waving will change this, and only when parents realize that yes, their child must do some work, will they stop blaming the teachers.

Complete information at:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2010/04/unlike_many_escalante_believed.html#more