The Best Teacher in America Stands and Delivers: The Case of Jaime Escalante

Dec. 7, 1982: Eighteen years have passed since eighteen Latino students at Garfield High, located in LA's East Barrio, retook the Advanced Placement Test (APT) in calculus to exonerate themselves of cheating. Their teacher, Jaime Escalante, now 70 years old, became a legend as a result. In 1988 his story was immortalized on the screen with Stand and Deliver, starring Edward James Olmos as the 52-year-old balding Escalante, and a book, Escalante: The Best Teacher in America (Mathews) was published that same year. How are we as educators to understand this phenomenon of success? How are we to judge it? I remember distinctly how impressed I was when the film first came out. Escalante's innovative teaching techniques, I thought, were precisely what my undergraduate class in teacher education needed to understand. I thought they were generalizable to every situation. I even used excerpts of the film to highlight the ways a class might be won over.

Here I am, some twelve years later revisiting that memory. I read the book, The Best Teacher in America, for the very first time and reviewed the film once more. But this time I hated it! The radical disjunctures between the book, my now improved—although still limited—comprehension of the American political context at that time, and the fictional account of the movie read, to me, like a cover-up. If the film had lived up to the portrait in the book, the fraudulence of the phallus would have been exposed. Instead it remained veiled. For Ronald Reagan, of course, Escalante's success was a politician's dream come true. He called it the best movie he had ever seen, the epitome of what all teachers should and could do despite all the social and political obstacles stacked against them. Escalante was even called to the White House to shake his hand. I think now I know why.

Escalante's filmic narrative was the first inner-city high school movie released in North America since The Blackb