Escalante's Formula Not Always the Answer

SACRAMENTO — Take a seat and brace yourself: This is no ordinary classroom.

"What are you, some stupid kid?" the teacher blasts.

Then, to another student: "Look at me when I look at you."

"You break your chair," he barks at a third, "I'm going to break your neck."

Such harshness is highly unusual in education today, being just a whisper away from the corporal punishment long banned in public schools.

But this is the doctrine of Jaime Escalante, the most famous high school math teacher of modern times.

At Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, Escalante's calculus revolution inspired the popular movie "Stand and Deliver," delivering a message that Americans desperately want to believe: that reforming education can be as simple as harnessing the power of one charismatic individual.

But here at Sacramento's Hiram Johnson High School, where Escalante has taught since 1991, that neat package appears to have fallen apart.

For reasons ranging from parental resistance to lack of administrative support--and perhaps his own inability to connect with a very different crop of students--Escalante, at 67, has been unable to work his magic again.

The school district converted a cavernous shop room into a classroom just for him, with a one-way mirrored observation booth so visitors could watch the legend at work. These days, however, the man who gained renown for enrolling hundreds of students in calculus at Garfield is not even teaching that subject.

The official reasons he has no calculus students sound logical enough: Only six students enrolled in his advanced class, causing it to be dropped; and, by that time, someone else was assigned to handle introductory calculus.

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Letters from parents and administrators hint at a more troubling undercurrent, though. They complain about Escalante's tactics, saying the students shy away from letting him know they don't understand for fear of public humiliation.

At least a third of his Algebra I students have dropped out since the start of the year. That leaves 20 teenagers scattered around his huge classroom. His classes at Garfield were packed with 60 students.

Even when he was still teaching calculus at Hiram Johnson, the program was not growing at a great clip. Last year, only 11 students took the Advanced Placement exam in the subject--the test that became the most tangible measure of what his culture of high expectations achieved at Garfield. There, more than 140 students took it during his last year.