R.I.P. Jaime Escalante

A great teacher has passed away.

Jaime Escalante, whose story was told in book and on the big screen in Stand And Deliver, has succumbed to cancer at the age of 79.

LOS ANGELES — The math teacher at a tough East Los Angeles high school who inspired the movie “Stand and Deliver,” has died. He was 79.

Family friend Keith Miller says Jaime Escalante died Tuesday in Reno, Nev., where he was undergoing treatment for bladder cancer.

An immigrant from Bolivia, he transformed Garfield High School by motivating struggling students to tackle and excel at advanced math and science. The school had more Advanced Placement calculus students than all but three other public high schools in the country.

Michelle Malkin, who encountered Escalante while covering education in Los Angeles, writes a fitting tribute to a man who bucked every educational fad in order to propel his students to excellence:

Jaime Escalante cared about kids. Not about teachers’ unions or partisan politics or educrat ass-covering or racial grievance-mongering. The Bolivian-born physics and math teacher demanded excellence and hard work, raised standards and expectations, and defied critics and naysayers by teaching algebra and calculus to East L.A. high school students whom the government school system had abandoned and written off …

Escalante’s death comes at a time when California education faddists are once again threatening a new front in the old Math Wars and clamoring to lower already degraded academic standards (see my work on the crapy known as Everyday Math). We need more of the real deal Jaime Escalantes now more than ever. Instead, far too many teachers have abandoned their roles as imparters of knowledge for the lazy hackery of social justice activists.
In an age of dumbed-down schools and victimhood indoctrination, the fierce, demanding, no-excuses doctrine of Jaime Escalante will be sorely missed and never forgotten.