{"id":521457,"date":"2010-04-09T03:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-09T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sacbee.com\/2010\/04\/09\/2665872\/escalante-system-didnt-translate.html#mi_rss=Opinion"},"modified":"2010-04-09T03:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-09T07:00:00","slug":"viewpoints-escalante-system-didnt-translate-well","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/521457","title":{"rendered":"Viewpoints: Escalante system didn’t translate well"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t<\/a>
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\n\tRalph C. Carmona<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was deeply moved by the movie “Stand and Deliver”, the 1988 motion picture starring actor Edward James Olmos, about the recently deceased Jaime Escalante. The public school teacher and Latino immigrant found fame at my alma mater, Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, by bringing national attention to racial discrimination involving Latino students. <\/p>\n

Through sheer personality and drive, Escalante not only taught Garfield’s Mexican American students calculus but prepared them to pass college entrance exams – only to be wrongfully accused of cheating. It was classic racial profiling: Poor and segregated Mexican kids were not supposed to pass such tests.<\/p>\n

His tireless effort rose above lowered student expectations integral to racial segregation. Escalante’s bilingual endeavor to push ganas,<\/i> or desire, onto Garfield students turned conventional wisdom on its head. He was a life-changer for those aimless Latinos confined by the benign neglect of his colleagues and the structure of public schooling.<\/p>\n

Then came the corporate and political influence, seeking to benefit from a teacher’s incredible classroom accomplishment. Escalante played along, failing to adequately apply his momentous fame to enhance public teaching. He became a motivational speaker and a “go-to Latino” for Republicans supporting voter-passed anti-Latino state measures during the 1990s to end emergency services for undocumented immigrants, affirmative action and bilingual education. He dismissed Latino critics, claiming that he “put East Los Angeles on the map” and squandered his goodwill with hostility toward other teachers. This blinded Escalante from seeing that his ganas<\/i> or desire-driven charisma in a segregated Garfield environment was not automatically transferable to non-Latino classrooms in Sacramento. <\/p>\n

I was one of those who experienced Garfield’s segregated Latino world. Like many of Escalante’s students, I intuitively avoided pondering and felt conflicted over my self-worth. The school’s internecine variations were there; be it immigrant status, gradations of color, linguistic or generation differences. A small percent of us were non-Latinos of different color or religion. <\/p>\n

At our first-year orientation, the vice principal wished us well in our effort to avoid an expected 60 percent dropout rate. Like many, I was a non-college student destined for dead-end work, Vietnam or community college. The prevailing sentiment was that lingering sense of what Betty Friedan, in her classic “Feminine Mystique,” defines as a problem with no name.<\/p>\n

The 1960s fundamentally changed that. My Escalante ganas<\/i> came when some students became “Chicanos” and dared to see life as more than a “Mexican problem.” University of Southern California Chicano student protests gave me an affirmative action ticket to the campus; an admission based less on college exams or grades than my potential desire to learn and perform. My opportunity was not because of any single person, but a civil rights movement that opened doors for the poor and people of color on life’s margins. It reflected President Lyndon Johnson’s policies that created a political climate of outreach, integration and opportunity. <\/p>\n

Before his portrayal of Escalante in “Stand and Deliver,” Olmos was among those who helped me in my life journey. I organized from scratch a 1982 Latino scholarship event in Pasadena. Following months of effort, I successfully recruited the actor, fresh from his starring role in “Zoot Suit,” to be my master of ceremonies. Over breakfast, Olmos shared the years of effort it took for him to find success. Impressed with my words of community engagement, he stopped me cold when I talked of a doctoral degree that I probably “will never finish.” <\/p>\n

I will always remember his affirming response: “You will finish that degree, you understand? You will finish it.<\/i>“<\/p>\n

Those words changed my life. Like Escalante with his Garfield students, Olmos emboldened me to complete my doctorate. <\/p>\n

In 1997, I opposed an English-only initiative and sought out Escalante at Sacramento’s Hiram Johnson High School. I wanted to know why he publicly supported a state ballot proposition that would undermine his bilingual approach to Latino students. Taking time to observe him in a Sacramento classroom, it became obvious that his teaching did not live up to the “Stand and Deliver” expectations. His Bolivian accent and bilingual assertions of ganas<\/i> did not readily connect with a mostly non-Latino poor student class. <\/p>\n

Over lunch, I quickly realized that he was clueless about the initiative he endorsed. Acknowledging this, Escalante left open a reconsideration of his position if I brought in Olmos and the late Sacramento Mayor Joe Serna to meet with him. However, he soon decided against any future meeting, leaving further discussion about his position with those pushing the initiative.<\/p>\n

It was all about partisan politics – not teaching. Among the initiative’s supporters was Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, who earlier considered appointing Escalante to fill an elected state superintendent of public instruction vacancy. Fortunately, he concluded that Escalante’s world was that of a classroom – not California public policy. <\/p>\n

Students like those in Escalante’s Garfield class now permeate many of California’s public schools. We need more bilingual teachers like Escalante and public policies that positively affect student performance. A decade of failure to do either has contributed to the Golden State’s growing public school multiracial segregation, achievement gaps and dropouts. <\/p>\n

To understand that is to know that Escalante stood and delivered for a classroom of Latino students at Garfield High School – not the broader world of public education.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ralph C. Carmona I was deeply moved by the movie “Stand and Deliver”, the 1988 motion picture starring actor Edward James Olmos, about the recently deceased Jaime Escalante. The public school teacher and Latino immigrant found fame at my alma mater, Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, by bringing national attention to racial discrimination […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4325,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-521457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4325"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521457\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}