The Escalante Equation : After the Publicity Blitz of ‘Stand and Deliver,’ Master Math Teacher Jaime Escalante Is Back Full Time at the Blackboard

MANY PEOPLE tell stories of educational miracles, blessed with as much hope and hyperbole as real achievement. They usually celebrate the restoration of the national mean: A terrible school in a bad neighborhood finds a way to reach the standard of an average school in a good neighborhood. Marva Collins motivates inner-city Chicago children to read above their grade level. George McKenna, while working as a Los Angeles principal, doubles the number of Scholastic Aptitude Test takers at Washington Preparatory High School and cuts its dropout rate. Such achievements are a credit to the educators responsible. But they do not come close to what happened at James A. Garfield High School in East Los Angeles.

In 1982, 18 students at Garfield took the Advanced Placement calculus examination, and 12 were forced to take it again after charges of cheating. All of them passed, as they had the first time around. Early this year, the story was made into a movie, “Stand and Deliver.” But the media’s focus on the charges of cheating, and of minority bias that accompanied them, seems incidental to the real story. How in the world did a place like Garfield find 18 students willing and prepared to take the AP calculus test at all?

Garfield High School was built in 1925 at what is now 5101 East 6th St. in East Los Angeles. It is a short block from Atlantic Boulevard, a raw stretch of telephone poles, used-car lots, banks, bars, hamburger-burrito stands, churches and service stations. At least 80% of Garfield’s students qualify for the federal free- or reduced-price-lunch program, which means that their parents’ annual incomes fall below $15,000 for a family of four. At least 25% of the students come from families that receive Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

More than 95% of the Garfield student body is Latino. Some of the families have recently immigrated to the United States from Mexico, often illegally. Even longtime residents usually speak Spanish at home. Few of the homes have many books in any language or framed degrees on the wall from institutions of any kind.

What Garfield accomplished in calculus in 1982, and what it continues to accomplish in 1988, is unprecedented. No ordinary inner-city school has ever achieved such national distinction in a major academic discipline.

Amid the cracked asphalt walks, the worn linoleum floors and the chain-link fences, Garfield has had one thing that is very special--Jaime Escalante.

YOU NOTICE his hands first. His thick brown fingers sweep the air when he lectures and grind chalk into the blackboard with an audible crack. He has a stocky build, a large square head with a prominent jaw and a widening bald spot covered by a few stray hairs. It takes time to adjust to his accent--English seasoned with bits of Spanish and two Bolivian Indian dialects. He looks oddly like the Garfield mascot, a gruff bulldog, and exudes a sense of mischief. He is almost 58, but he has only been teaching in this country since 1974. Jaime Alfonso Escalante Gutierrez was born on the last day of 1930 in La Paz, Bolivia. With his parents, school teachers Zenobio and Sara, he lived in Achacachi, an Aymara Indian village on the Bolivian altiplano . When he was 9, with little warning, his mother left. His father had not returned home the night before. Whether it was drink or another woman, Sara did not know, but it really didn’t matter anymore. Jaime had seen Zenobio hit Sara more than once, and the father’s wrath also occasionally fell on his small son.

Sara told Jaime she was taking his sisters and brother to La Paz. “You stay here and be with your father. Tell him when he comes home.”

Zenobio eventually appeared. After some hesitation, he gave Jaime a bus ticket to La Paz and careful directions on how to find the house of one of his mother’s relatives. Six hours later, Jaime found his mother looking out a doorway, astonished. She hugged him tight.

When he was 14, his mother managed to find enough money to send him to San Calixto, a prestigious Jesuit high school. To Jaime it was heaven, a place where quick wits and a passion for odd corners of human knowledge could charm the priests and cause them to forgive his many transgressions.

In his fourth-form year, the equivalent of American 10th grade, he fell under the spell of a new physics teacher from France, Father Descottes. The man was thin and gray and sarcastic, but he made magic in a laboratory with an electric motor, a set of pre-measured weights, a compass and a small pendulum. Jaime volunteered to keep the laboratory clean if he could learn more about the instruments and borrow some of the priest’s books. Then a sour-tongued Chilean layman named Lincoyan Portus arrived to teach the works of Isaac Newton. Portus would begin each class with a story, usually obscene or at least in questionable taste. A good student paid attention.

“Escalante!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Can you repeat the joke I told yesterday?”

“Certainly.” And then Jaime would tell it, often with embellishments he thought improved on the original.

Teachers who did not appreciate such creativity sent him out to the patio to stand with his arms extended until told he could relax. He sent one proctor into an uncontrollable rage by objecting to a 20-peso fine for damaging a desk during a fight. “You should divide that by three, sir.” Jaime said. “One who should pay is this guy here, he messed me up, and his friend over there, who was coming to help him.”

“I don’t think we can do that.”

“You can’t divide by three, sir? I can help you.”

Uncle Arturo, his mother’s brother and often his guardian angel, was forced to make one last appeal when Jaime was caught tossing a string of firecrackers under the gown of the school director during an impromptu graduation celebration. “At least the kid does something,” went Uncle Arturo’s plea. “That’s the kind of man we need these days, don’t you think, Father?”

In 1948, Escalante was 17, out of high school and at loose ends. He had thoughts of engineering school in Argentina, but there was no money. During a brief Bolivian rebellion, he went in and out of the army. One day, his friend Roberto Cordero suggested that Escalante sign up with him at the state teachers college, Normal Superior.

“Ahh, no. I don’t want that,” Escalante said.

Cordero coaxed him. “OK,” Escalante sighed. “Can’t hurt to give it one shot.”

In fact, both Cordero and Escalante passed the entrance exam and enrolled. In his four years at the Normal, Escalante became a minor legend--the teacher who worked at three different schools before he even graduated. In his second year, one of his instructors suggested him as a fill-in physics teacher at the American Institute. During his junior year, he moonlighted at a public school, National Bolivar. The principal there noticed his lack of experience and told him to watch the other teachers. After a few minutes with a science teacher named Tito Melean, a stout little man with a thatch of gray hair, Escalante was enthralled. Melean had acquired a student nickname, Marshal Tito, but the Eastern European he most resembled was Prince Vlad the Impaler. While lecturing, he roamed the classroom swinging a long, thick bone. The students believed it was human. He caressed it, bounced it off the palm of his hand, swung it up and down as he watched a student squirm under the strain of a sudden lapse of memory. A wrong answer and the bone descended quickly toward the top of the student’s head, ending in a light tap. A touch of theatrics and a touch of menace, Escalante learned, have their uses.

Escalante fulfilled his final requirement of the Normal--a math class he had never bothered to attend--a year after the rest of his class graduated. It was 1954. He was only 23 and teaching at San Calixto, his old school and one of the best in La Paz, as well as at National Bolivar. In November, he married Fabiola Tapia, another Normal student.

In 1955, the Escalantes had their first child, Jaimito. Escalante’s students began to win important awards in the city. By 1961, the Escalante family had attained a living standard well above the average urban Bolivian. But Fabiola, whose father and brothers had been educated in California, talked of emigration. It took a tour of the eastern United States--sponsored by President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress and including Niagara Falls, a handshake with the President and a trip through a gleaming high school physics laboratory--to get Escalante to agree. On an overcast Christmas Eve, 1963, he arrived, alone, at Los Angeles International Airport.

AS THE first step in his adjustment to American life, Jaime Escalante spent $2,400 of the $3,000 he had brought with him on a light green, 1964 Volkswagen beetle. He had wanted to own such a car for a long time. He did not know what else he wanted to do. Fabiola was still in Bolivia. She wanted him to go back to school. He did not want to rush it.

He stayed in Pasadena with Fabiola’s brother, Sam Tapia. He watched television. He strolled around the neighborhood. Whenever Sam was there to answer his questions, he asked about the weather, the availability of Bolivian food and jobs.

Eventually, he tired of the house and began to look for work. At a large blue-and-white Van de Kamp’s restaurant across the street from Pasadena City College, Escalante found manager Karl Polsky, who needed someone to clean up. He gave Escalante a mop. Escalante mopped. He swept. He scrubbed. At closing time, 7 p.m., he stacked all the chairs on the tables and gave everything one last hard mopping. “See you tomorrow, Jaime,” Polsky said, pleased with his pupil’s progress.

When Fabiola and Jaimito arrived in California a few months later, Escalante could not meet them at the airport. He had been promoted to cook at Van de Kamp’s and could not be spared. He had reorganized the menu and redone the work schedule. Polsky spoke of turning over the whole operation to him. He had his routine: days at the restaurant, nights at Pasadena City College studying for an AA in math and physics.

Fabiola did not like the Van de Kamp’s job. It wasn’t the wages. Her husband was actually making more than his $100-a-week teacher’s salary back in La Paz. What she disliked was the taint of a blue-collar job for a man with a degree and a professional reputation.

“This is all temporary,” Escalante told her. “I am learning English. I have some courses at PCC. Now I can write to the state, send them my credential and awards, and maybe they’ll have a teacher’s job for me. I will tell them I’ve been to the White House.”

But the California Department of Education responded with a form letter, correct and curt. His Bolivian credential and education were not acceptable. He would have to repeat his entire college education--four years of full-time study plus another year to earn a teaching credential. He could not support his family and carry a full academic load. How long would that take, going to night school?

“Jaime, all this means is you have no need to go back to teaching,” Fabiola said. “You can go into electronics instead. You’ve always been interested in that.” Her campaign proceeded quietly and steadily. She worked on an assembly line at the Burroughs Corp. plant in Pasadena. She saw plenty of technicians there who knew less than her husband did about electronics. Why did he insist on being a cook? Why didn’t he apply at Burroughs?

He acquiesced, applied and took a job in the parts department. Eventually, he was touring the plant in his long white coat, advising the engineers on trouble spots, suggesting new circuit designs. In four years, the company offered him a supervisor’s job in a new plant in Guadalajara, Mexico. But he did not want anything to interfere with the American education of his children--Fernando, his second son, had been born in 1969. He also was about to complete a bachelor’s degree in mathematics at Cal State L.A. Perhaps he wouldn’t stay with Burroughs much longer.

In January, 1973, he heard about a National Science Foundation scholarship for teachers. “This is my chance,” he told Fabiola. He could study for his teaching credential full time. He could be back in front of a classroom in a year. This time Fabiola acquiesced.

The selection process required tests in math, physics and teaching technique. For the final examination, 15 college students were placed in a classroom and told to act like unruly high school students. The five finalists were to prepare a math lesson and teach it, as well as they could, for 30 minutes.

When Escalante entered the classroom, two boys were staging a fistfight in a corner. Jaime greeted them with open arms. “You gentlemen want to fight? I think that’s wonderful! I’m going to fight each of you after class. I was a good fighter in my country, you’ll see.”

Another boy shouted, “What are you going to talk about?”

Escalante smiled. “I am Mr. Escalante. I am going to talk about math.”

“Nah, that’s cold, man, Let’s talk about sex.”

Escalante put an equation on the board. “I’m going to talk about this,” he said. He lowered his voice and winked at the boy. “We’re going to talk about sex after this. After this we’re going to have sex, too.” Some members of the class looked startled. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it. But of course you have to assign priorities. You want sex? OK. But first we do my assignment. This is only going to take one minute.”

He launched into a discussion of a shortcut to eliminate memorizing the multiplication tables. His audience, intrigued, watched without complaint. He tried his number trick: “Take any five-digit number, subtract the sum of the digits, cross out a digit of the new number, and tell me the sum of the remaining digits. . . . What you get? You.”

“Twelve,” a boy said.

“Twelve? That means you crossed out a six.”

The boy looked mildly astonished. “Yeah,” he said.

Some hands began to go up. “How did you get that?” someone asked. He led them into a discussion of the process of subtraction.

Time was almost up. Escalante grinned and turned to his original interlocutor. “Now, you said you wanted to talk about sex? Why not? Why don’t you start? Tell us all you know on the subject.” A supervisor stepped in. “Thank you, Mr. Escalante. Thanks, everyone.”

A week later they told him he had the scholarship.

ESCALANTE BEGAN to teach math at Garfield High School in the fall of 1974. It would be more than a year before he even heard of the Advanced Placement program, and another three years before he added AP calculus to his class load. The AP program, he discovered, was designed to give high school students accelerated instruction and college-level credit if they could pass a year-end examination. It appealed to Escalante because he thought his students needed a goal, something more inspirational than a handball game against the teacher or a piece of candy. Besides, Escalante thought, the AP examination imposed a valid standard, some outside measure of how well he was doing.

Fourteen students were cajoled into his first AP class in the fall of 1978. Only five students lasted through the spring. They endured a schedule he introduced on the first day of class: “We open the doors here at 7. We start at 7:30. Then from 8 to 9 we have regular class. We are going to give you a lot of handouts and you have to take a lot of notes and keep a folder. Every morning we have a five-minute quiz. And a test on Friday.”

Five is the top grade given on an AP test; one the lowest and three is a passing grade, the score that will guarantee college credit. In May, 1979, the Garfield students came out of the examination looking bleak and shellshocked. They turned in two 4s, two 2s and one 1.

Escalante resolved to do better. Every day was an improvisation. His students needed something extra to accelerate their understanding. He had to soften calculus’s granite-hard image. His principal devices were humor, nonchalance and an appeal to team spirit. The class motto appeared in a huge poster on his wall: “Calculus need not be made easy; it is easy already.”

The basic-mathematics students seemed to appreciate visual presentation, like cutting up an apple to show fractions. What could he do in calculus? A windup toy consisting of two walking shoes became the symbol for a careful, step-by-step approach to all algebraic functions. A plastic monkey that climbed up and down a small pole illustrated the inverse function, exchanging x for y . A picture of a clown symbolized a popular fast-food chain. “You don’t do your homework,” he told them, “you gonna be working the rest of your life at Jack-in-the-Box.”

When one of his students almost missed graduation because he failed to attend an art class, Escalante conceived his contract system. Anyone who joined the calculus team, or its underclass farm clubs, would have to sign, along with their parents, a paper promising attention, homework, good attendance and consistent effort in all their classes. He would in turn promise to teach them what they needed to know.

And he coerced them into staying when the workload got daunting. “Look, all you have to do is sit up here in front, and I will give you an A without doing anything. You want an A or not?”

“Yeah.”

“So you can correct these papers for me, but before you do that, you’ll need a little practice, so do these exercises first.”

In May 1980, the scores were one 4, five 3s and two 2s. Escalante sensed that he was moving toward something good.

IN JUNE 1982, 153 readers working for the Educational Testing Service graded the calculus AP free responses (a “story problem” section) for the 23,825 exams taken that year. Among the exams they considered were 18 from Jaime Escalante’s ‘81-’82 class.

About midway through the grading session, a reader noticed something strange in a botched solution to Question Six. The test taker had begun with an incorrect formula, but that wasn’t what bothered the reader. What disturbed him was that another exam he had read within the hour showed the same errors. He searched his stack and found the other test. He took both to the chief reader.

Within a day, the chief reader had two more pairs of booklets found by two other readers with the same similarities on Question Six. All six students, it turned out, had taken the test in the same room at Garfield High in Los Angeles.

The six test booklets were sent to the ETS test security office, where they were analyzed for other similarities.

The results caused the ETS Board of Review to ask that all the Garfield examinations be checked. Of the 18 tests, it was concluded, 12 had responses in Question Six that suggested copying. In addition, 14 of the tests, including the 12 with similarities on Question Six, had multiple-choice answers that agreed with at least one other exam to a degree expected in only one out of every 100,000 cases. The Board of Review voted to challenge the validity of 14 of the 18 Garfield examinations.

The ETS wanted the students to consider the situation as they would a tax audit: a check of the records that might take some time and trouble, and perhaps some payment in the end, but would imply no shame or criminality. They offered four options: Let ETS cancel the grade and refund the exam fee; provide the ETS with additional information to show the grade was valid; submit the dispute to arbitration or to their college, or retake the test.

As the notices reached East L.A., Escalante talked to his students, and then-Garfield Principal Henry Gradillas questioned them. Had they copied? No, they said. Escalante, Gradillas and other teachers and counselors called the ETS to explain the teaching method, to say there must be some mistake. They sent character references and explanations of what might have happened: “Our instructor did not accept any other method of solving problems than his own. Consequently, our steps in solving calculus problems were obviously similar if not the same,” one student explained.

An ETS official investigated the test site. Another met with Escalante, who lost his temper and accused the ETS of discrimination. The readers had had no way of knowing the name, school or ethnic group of any test taker, the official explained. It would be discriminatory if the ETS took action because the students were Latino. It would also be discriminatory if they failed to act for the same reason.

Recently, 10 of the 1982 calculus students signed releases allowing ETS to give me copies of their original examinations and any other materials the testing service thought relevant. In the tests that I looked at, nine students began Question Six with the wrong formula, made a variety of errors, and then made the same error in substitution. It was an error that, as the board of review pointed out, did “not follow logically from the preceding” work. (The 10th test reviewed showed the student had started Question Six differently, and got the right answer. Her test had been questioned because of too-close agreement with other tests in the multiple-choice section.)

After being promised anonymity, two of those test takers with similarities on Question Six contradicted earlier statements. They said they and some others--they did not know how many--had copied the work of another student. They said the other student, whom they would not name, had wanted to be helpful and had passed around a piece of paper with a suggested solution to Question Six near the end of the examination, when there was no time to check for errors. They said no copying had occurred on the multiple-choice section of the examination or on any other free-response question.

Of the remaining students who allowed their tests to be reviewed, four denied--again--copying at any point in the exam. Three could not be reached for comment.

When I told Escalante about these interviews, he said he was certain there had been no copying. “I stand behind my kids,” he said. “I believe in my students.” Most of the former students sent him personal letters saying they had not copied. Eventually, they produced a joint letter denying that any of them had copied. It was signed by nearly everyone, including one of the two students who had told me that copying had occurred.

That student also sent me a letter: Everything he had told me, he wrote, was a “joke” to test a theory that I was an agent for ETS. “I told you lies, noth ing but lies. What I told you was I felt all that you expected and wanted to hear. . . we passed and re-passed without any cheating whatsoever.”

My questions created much emotional turmoil and controversy in East Los Angeles. There were intense discussions over what might have motivated some students to copy--youthful bravado? Obsessive perfectionism? Nagging doubts about their own abilities? Many people also speculated over what--a taste for mischief? weariness over the rehashing of 1982?--might have led two former students to tell me there was copying when there was not.

Whatever occurred during the first 1982 examination, it ceased to have much meaning for what continued to happen at Garfield. The 1982 students proved themselves by passing the retest, even with only a weekend to prepare. The odd truth is that Garfield eventually benefited from the controversy. The initial distress and rage created a mood that made the story of the successful retest irresistible and persuaded more students to take calculus and more administrators, parents and donors to support Escalante.

There is something in Escalante’s frequent explanations of the mathematical term absolute value that casts light on what happened at Garfield. X inside two vertical lines, / x /, means absolute value of x , a quantity that may be either negative or positive. Escalante explains the concept a dozen different ways. One way to remember it is this: The value within is more important than its positive or negative sign. Sometimes in mathematics as in life, negative and positive are just different directions toward the same goal.

TODAY, VISITORS TOUR Garfield with the frequency and reverence usually reserved for state ly European cathedrals. Like such places, the old school is still battling physical deterioration, as well as the problems of poverty and ignorance it has encountered all its life.

Escalante’s classes, still open for business and attracting more students than ever, have felt unexpected ill effects of the school’s and his new celebrity status.

In 1987, the calculus students prepared by Escalante and his colleague Ben Jimenez broke all records for inner-city schools. One hundred twenty-nine of them took the AP calculus examination, more than at any public school in the country except predominantly Asian-American Alhambra High and the two New York City superschools, Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. Two-thirds of the Garfield students passed the test; according to College Board figures, they made up more than 26% of all Mexican-Americans in the country who received scores of 3 or better.

In 1988, after the release of the movie “Stand and Deliver” in March, Escalante and Garfield were besieged by journalists, well-wishers and VIPs. One result, according to Escalante, was that the number of students taking the test dropped to 118, and the percentage passing fell to slightly more than 46%.

For nearly any other school, those figures would still be cause for rejoicing. Fewer than a dozen U.S. public schools had more than 55 passing calculus scores last year. Garfield this year pushed its total number of AP examinations in all subjects to 443--more than the total for all public high schools in some major U.S. cities.

Escalante and Jimenez currently have nearly 200 calculus students. They have divided them into slightly smaller classes than in previous years, and have one other faculty member, Angelo Villavicencio, preparing to assume some of the load. But they still fight the same battles against inattention, poverty and low self-esteem that Escalante found when he arrived at the school 14 years ago.

Escalante has learned the positive uses of fame--such as George Bush’s mention of him as an American hero in the last presidential debate--as well as its negatives. It is easier to raise money now for his special summer and Saturday classes, which have been a part of the program since 1983. He sees a chance to spread his methods throughout the country. But he tells his students that what they saw in “Stand and Deliver” was only a quick, colorful outline of what calculus--or any useful endeavor--demands in real life.

“Some of them saw the film three or four times,” Escalante says. “They thought it was going to be easy, just like in the movies.

“Well, it’s not.”

“Escalante: The Best Teacher in America,” copyright 1988 by Jay Mathews.