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I just watched the movie Stand and Deliver again. It's the story of Jamie Escalante, the Bolivian American math teacher known for bringing calculus classes to Garfield High School in East Los Angeles.
Perhaps you've seen the 1988 film starring Edward James Olmos (legend of Miami Vice and Blade Runner). It tells the story of a teacher who fought the bigotry of low expectations and transformed a school whose accreditation was under threat, and turned it into one of the best high school math programs in the country.
Spoiler - in the film, after the first year of his program, his 18 students all passed the college Advanced Placement exam (actually, it took years for him to build the program). It was in 1982 when students first took the test. In 1983, 31 students passed the AP, 1984 - 63 students, 1985 - 77 students, 1986 - 78 students, and 1987 - 87 students. And the next year, the film came out along with a bestselling book by Jay Mathews, Escalante: The Best Teacher in America.
Of course, Escalante's fellow teachers and the teachers' unions celebrated this hero's success and asked, "How can we replicate this success in all public schools?" Yeah, KIDDING!
Escalante started to receive threats and hate mail. In 1990 he lost his math department chairmanship. His math enrichment program had 400 students with 50 students per class. He received intense criticism from the teachers' union. They wanted class sizes limited to 35 students. By 1991, 570 students at Garfield were taking AP tests of various kinds. But that same year, citing faculty politics and jealousy, Escalante left Garfield and went to Johnson High in Sacramento, California. In 2001, Escalante returned to his native Bolivia to teach there. Escalante died in 2010 of bladder cancer.
Last year, about 40 students at Garfield High took AP exams in math. Which is still pretty good compared to many other American high schools.
It's rather obvious that excellence for students is not a priority for America's teachers' unions. Or they would celebrate teachers like Escalante rather than snuff out their endeavors.
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He was opposed by almost everyone in the school system- from administrators to teachers to janitors. He was greatly aided by one principle- but when he left it was open season on Escalante. To create the system required the students to have years of preparation which meant a system wide commitment to education.
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The problem is not just teachers unions. They are good enforcers of the problem, though.
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"When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children."
Albert Shanker, President of the United Federation of Teachers (1974-1997)
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I've read that several of the student's later admitted that they had cheated on the first test by passing notes around with the solutions to some of the problems.
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