Stand and Deliver

For other uses, see Stand and Deliver (disambiguation).

Stand and Deliver
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Ramon Menendez
Produced by	Tom Musca
Written by	Ramon Menendez Tom Musca
Starring	Edward James Olmos Lou Diamond Phillips Rosanna DeSoto Andy García
Music by	Craig Safan
Cinematography	Tom Richmond
Editing by	Nancy Richardson
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release date(s)	March 11, 1988 (1988-03-11)
Running time	102 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Box office	$13,994,920

Stand and Deliver is a 1988 American drama film, based on the true story of high school mathematics teacher Jaime Escalante. Edward James Olmos portrayed Escalante in the film and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. The film was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2011.

Plot

In the area of East Los Angeles, California, in 1982, in an environment that values a quick fix over education and learning, Jaime Escalante is a new teacher at Garfield High School determined to change the system and challenge the students to a higher level of achievement. Leaving a steady job for a position as a math teacher in a school where rebellion runs high and teachers are more focused on discipline than academics, Escalante is at first not well liked by students, receiving numerous taunts and threats.

As the year progresses, he is able to win over the attention of the students by implementing innovative teaching techniques. He is able to transform even the most troublesome teens into dedicated students. While Escalante teaches basic arithmetic and elementary and intermediate algebra, he realizes that his students have far more potential. He decides to teach them calculus. To do so, he holds a summer course of what is implied in the movie as pre-calculus material, such as advanced algebra, math analysis, and trigonometry. Calculus starts in the students' senior year. Despite concerns and skepticism of other teachers, who feel that "you can't teach logarithms to illiterates," Escalante nonetheless develops a program in which his students can eventually take AP Calculus by their senior year, which will give them college credit. This intense math program requires that students take summer classes, including Saturdays from 7:00 AM to noon, taxing for even the most devoted among them.

While other students spend their summers working or becoming teenage parents, Escalante's students learn complex theorems and formulas. The vast contrast between home life and school life, however, begins to show as these teens struggle to find the balance between what other adults and especially their parents expect of them and the goals and ambitions they hold for themselves. Several students must confront issues at home. In a memorable scene, Escalante follows a crying girl as she leaves the classroom and runs through the school. With Escalante to help them, they soon find the courage to separate from society's expectations for failure and rise to the standard to which Escalante had set for them. Taking the AP Calculus exam in the spring of their senior year, these students are relieved and overjoyed to be finished with a strenuous year. After receiving their scores, they are overwhelmed with emotion to find that they have all passed, a feat done by few in the state.

Later that summer a shocking accusation is made: the Educational Testing Service calls into question the validity of their scores when it is discovered that similarities between errors is too high for pure chance. Outraged by the implications of cheating, Escalante feels that the racial and economic status of the students has caused the ETS to doubt their intelligence. In order to prove their mathematical abilities and worth to the school, to the ETS, and to the nation, the students agree to retake the test at the end of the summer, months after their last class. The students are given only one day to prepare and Escalante gravely tells them that the test will be harder than the first. The students all pass and Escalante tells the school principal that he wants his students' original scores reinstated.

Historical accuracy

Ten of the students agreed to sign waivers so that the College Board could show Jay Mathews, author of Escalante: The Best Teacher in America, their exam papers. Mathews found that nine of the 10 had made "identical silly mistakes" on free-response question Number 6. Mathews heard two of the students passed around a piece of paper with that flawed solution during the exam. 12 students (including the 9 with the identical mistakes) retook the exam, most of them got 4s and 5s on the 5 point exam. In 1987, 27 percent of all Mexican Americans who scored 3 or higher on the calculus AP exam were students at Garfield High.

Escalante actually first began teaching at Garfield High School in 1974 and taught his first AP Calculus course in 1978 with a group of 14 students. Only five students remained in the course at the end of the year and of the five, only two passed the AP Calculus exam.

Legacy

In December 2011, Stand and Deliver was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry. The Registry said the film was "one of the most popular of a new wave of narrative feature films produced in the 1980s by Latino filmmakers" and that it "celebrates in a direct, approachable, and impactful way, values of self-betterment through hard work and power through knowledge."

See also

• AFI 100 most uplifting films
• 1988 in film
• Cinema of the United States
• List of American films of 1988

External links

• Stand and Deliver at the Internet Movie Database
• Stand and Deliver at AllRovi