Eric.ed.gov – The Jaime Escalante Math Program.

This article describes the Jaime Escalante Math Program, a system that in 1989 helped an East Los Angeles high school set a record by administering over 450 Advanced Placement exams, having administered only 10 tests in 1978. The article is presented in three sections. The first section describes the program, discussing origins and backgrounds: student recruitment, the curriculum, scheduling, textbooks used, past graduates as models of achievement, community resources recruitment, and teaching methods. The second section describes the fundamental principles of the Escalante Math Program. Ideas discussed include student, teacher, and parent accountability, hard work, teacher expectation, love for the students, parental involvement, mutual respect, proper nutrition, and preventing drug use. The final section, on psychology and the schools, proposes that teachers who encourage, discipline, and motivate their students can gain their willingness to work and help the students overcome the obstacles to getting an education that inner-city students face. The conclusion describes a vision of mathematics education program of hard work combined with love, humor, and a recognition of “ganas,” the desire to learn and ability to sacrifice that young people have, that will provide an educational pipeline taking students from kindergarten through to college completion. (MDH)