Out now from Inkwell Press is a biography I co-wrote with Alex Thomas. The subject is Jaime Escalante, a wildly successful immigrant calculus teacher in East Los Angeles, featured in the film Stand and Deliver (in which Edward James Olmos played Escalante). The book, Defying Low Expectations: What Jaime Escalante Taught Us About Learning, is available at Amazon.
My hope is that it will play a significant role in reforming American education, especially for K-12 mathematics. The book’s cover image is a famous mural of Olmos and Escalante in a very rough part of Los Angeles (the intersection of Alvarado and Wilshire). Note the shoes dangling from the telephone wire, often understood as a signifier of gang activity.
A book about Jaime Escalante may sound far removed from intelligent design. One story is about classrooms and kids; the other is about biological origins and science. But beneath the surface they meet at a deeper level: both address whether educational institutions will tell the truth about reality, and what happens when these institutions decide they cannot afford certain conclusions. Escalante’s achievement was not merely that his students passed an AP Calculus exam. It was that they produced a result the system had come to treat as impossible — or, worse, as politically inconvenient.
That is why Escalante’s story matters to intelligent design. When a narrative becomes sacred, counterexamples become dangerous. The old eugenic story treated certain groups as inherently “uneducable.” Escalante, by taking the very students who were supposed to embody this limitation and by guiding them into mastery of calculus, exposed that story as superstition dressed in scientific language. But the more unsettling lesson is that new stories can play the same role even when they claim to be humane: different jargon, similar effect. When education is reframed so that excellence is suspicious, standards are portrayed as oppressive, and rigor is treated as cultural domination, the result isn’t liberation — it’s a softer, more respectable way of fencing off whole populations from high achievement, to say nothing of fencing them off from truth.
A Disastrous Habit
This is where the connection to intelligent design becomes concrete. Whatever one thinks about design arguments, they rise or fall in a culture that either encourages serious questioning or else punishes it. If a student is trained — explicitly or implicitly — to think that difficult knowledge is “not for you,” or that certain lines of inquiry are socially transgressive, or that some questions are simply forbidden, then that student will grow into an adult who cannot independently assess contested claims. In that world, they lose the ability to think critically. Instead, they adopt the disastrous habit of simply deferring. They don’t reason or weigh evidence. They take cues. And that kills intellectual vitality, which depends on open evaluation rather than mere credentialed consensus — whether the topic is education reform or intelligent design.
The importance of calculus in this story is not symbolic; it is strategic. Arguments about origins are often presented as slogans, but the real questions live in the weeds of probability, information, inference, and modeling. Those are mathematical neighborhoods. Without the ability to think quantitatively — to grasp what a search space is, to understand what “plausible mechanisms” could be, to recognize the difference between “it happened” and “this explains how it happened” — people have little choice but to outsource judgment. Escalante’s students didn’t just learn a subject; they acquired a kind of intellectual citizenship. They became the sort of people who can audit arguments rather than reflexively absorb them.
That’s why a book that rebuilds serious learning is an ally to intelligent design as a research program. Research programs don’t advance on vibes; they advance on people who can do hard work over long periods without quitting, who can tolerate correction, and who can refine their thinking through disciplined practice. Escalante created that kind of educational infrastructure — a pipeline of competence and courage. If modern schooling breaks that pipeline by lowering standards in the name of compassion or politics, it doesn’t just harm test scores. It shrinks the pool of future scientists, engineers, and scholars capable of contributing to any demanding field, including fields that challenge reigning assumptions.
Inconvenient Truths
Escalante’s story is not just about moral courage but also about methodological courage: the willingness to follow what works, to name what fails, and to keep going when the incentives point the other way. Such courage matters in classrooms because children pay the price when teachers take the path of least resistance and thus, for lack of courage, inflict on their students a substandard education. It also matters in science and public debate because whole societies drift into managed narratives when dissent becomes taboo. A culture that can’t handle inconvenient truths in education will struggle to handle inconvenient truths everywhere else.
ID makes its case based on evidence, inference, and an examination of the kinds of explanations that may legitimately compete in the scientific arena. If the habits of mind that Escalante cultivated — discipline, facility with abstraction, patient reasoning under pressure — are weakened or replaced by ideology and lowered expectations, then the public is left unable to assess such arguments on their merits. In that setting, controversial ideas are not tested so much as socially sorted: welcomed or excluded based on status cues. The legacy of Escalante’s is therefore more than his teaching techniques. It is his no-holds-barred devotion to achieving understanding and mastery. That attitude ensures that debates about intelligent design are decided by reasoning and evidence rather than by gatekeeping and fear.
Below are some more details about the book.
Book Description
Jaime Escalante didn’t just teach calculus in East LA; he blew up the lie that poor, minority students can’t handle serious academics — and then watched the system quietly bury the evidence. Defying Low Expectations tells the story beyond Stand and Deliver, the 1988 film about Escalante starring Edward James Olmos that became a classroom staple. Here we learn about the immigrant teacher from Bolivia, the maverick principal Henry Gradillas who cleared a path for him, and the forces that dismantled their success once it became too threatening to the status quo. Drawing on fresh interviews, lost online material, and hard data about today’s failing schools, Dembski and Thomas show how Escalante created an ecosystem where students did the hard thing — and won big. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a blueprint for rescuing American education. Escalante’s example exposes low expectations as educational malpractice and shows how disciplined teaching, principled leadership, and moral courage can turn “throwaway” American schools into powerhouses of learning.
From the 2025 Preface (Abridged)
The Backstory to This Book
Jaime Escalante’s story is widely known, at least in broad strokes: Escalante took a failing math program at East LA’s Garfield High, an inner-city school whose students were poor and largely Hispanic, and transformed it into a math powerhouse that, at its height in 1987, accounted for more than a quarter of all Hispanic students in the US who passed the AP Calculus exam. Only a handful of US high schools had more students pass the AP Calculus exam that year. But Escalante’s academic success at Garfield High didn’t stop with math. Across the school, academics improved — and not just a little, but dramatically. A rising tide lifts all boats.
What led to Escalante’s extraordinary success? What happened to his program in subsequent years? Most people know what they know about Escalante from the Hollywood film Stand and Deliver, which dramatized his success teaching math at Garfield High. The film was largely accurate, as this book recounts. But it doesn’t explain the groundwork and supporting players that led to Escalante’s success. Nor does it explain why Escalante’s program capsized once the principal who gave him undivided support, Henry Gradillas, left Garfield High to go elsewhere. We fill in those details in this book.
The story behind this book began in 2014. While working with an educational website, I had the opportunity to revisit Escalante’s legacy. Escalante passed away in 2010 at the age of 79, but I had long been a fan. Hollywood released the film about Escalante, Stand and Deliver, in 1988. Author Jay Mathews published Escalante: The Best Teacher in America in 1989. Both works inspired me. I completed my PhD in mathematics at the University of Chicago in 1988, specializing in probability theory. I was therefore a research mathematician rather than a mathematics educator. Yet I cheered Escalante from the sidelines, hoping someday I might contribute to his efforts to advance math education. This book is an attempt to fulfill that hope.
When I revisited Escalante’s legacy in 2014, the first person I contacted was Henry Gradillas. Gradillas, now in his 90s but then just turning 80, had a few years earlier written with Jerry Jesness Standing and Delivering: What the Movie Didn’t Tell (2010). That book focused on Gradillas’s role in Garfield High’s “golden age,” but also described the aftermath, showing how quickly the lessons that should have been learned and forever internalized about Garfield’s success could be forgotten.
One thing that became clear from that book and conversations with Henry is how important his role was in Escalante’s success. Escalante, as a rockstar teacher, was in the limelight. But Gradillas, as the key administrator, played a crucial supporting role that was largely ignored in Stand and Deliver. Escalante was like the Beatles, getting all the glory. Gradillas was like George Martin, their producer, working in the background to make their success possible. It therefore seemed time to retell the story of Jaime Escalante, going back to his beginnings, extending beyond his glory days at Garfield High, filling in missing details about what made his success possible, and then trying to understand what his legacy means and how, in practical terms, it can be applied.
In heading this project to reexamine Escalante’s legacy, I next contacted writer Alex Thomas, who at my urging wrote an article titled “Escalante in the 21st Century — Still Standing and Delivering,” which summarized the Escalante story as well as the keys to his success. Around the same time, my friend and colleague James Barham interviewed Henry Gradillas and Angelo Villavicencio. Villavicencio had been one of Escalante’s protégés at Garfield and taught some of its AP Calculus classes.
We also enlisted Mary Poplin, a professor at Claremont Graduate University, who was just up the road from Garfield. She had carefully studied teachers in LA County who defied expectations by helping disadvantaged students in otherwise low-performing, poverty-ridden schools do phenomenally well academically. And finally, James Barham interviewed Ben Carson, a world-famous pediatric neurosurgeon, for many years on the faculty at Johns Hopkins University, whose inspiring story about how he was able to overcome Detroit’s poor school system complemented Escalante’s approach to teaching and learning.
We collected all these pieces to make sense of Escalante’s legacy. They appeared for a time online. And then they vanished (unless you know where to look on the Web Archive). These pieces appear in this book as an afterword and appendices. Yet, at the heart of this book is a biography of Escalante that Alex and I wrote. Our aim was to put Escalante’s immense contribution to American education into perspective, while also detailing the forces arrayed against him that sought to memory-hole what he achieved and stood for.
Low Expectations as Ideology
Anyone who has studied the history of IQ testing and eugenics will recognize the weaponization of low expectations against people deemed inferior and therefore unworthy of receiving a good education. In the early 20th century that included my own ancestry of Eastern European immigrants — hence all the jokes about “dumb Polacks” that I had to endure growing up in Chicago. And of course, with far greater virulence, it included Blacks and Hispanics.
Consider, for instance, Lewis Terman. A psychologist who adapted Alfred Binet’s intelligence test into the Stanford-Binet scale, Terman popularized the concept of the intelligence quotient, or IQ, and promoted its widespread use in American education. In The Measurement of Intelligence (1916, pp. 91–92), Terman remarked that for “laboring men and servant girls,” his test of intelligence “told the truth.” What truth was that? As he explained:
These boys [and girls] are uneducable beyond the merest rudiments of training. No amount of school instruction will ever make them intelligent voters or capable citizens in the true sense of the word. Judged psychologically they cannot be considered normal.
[They] represent the level of intelligence which is very, very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest… Their dullness seems to be racial… [T]he whole question of racial differences in mental traits will have to be taken up anew and by experimental methods. The writer predicts that when this is done there will be discovered enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture.
Children of this group should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master abstractions, but they can often be made efficient workers, able to look out for themselves. There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding.
Granted, it didn’t take Jaime Escalante to show that Terman was wrong — the crass eugenics of Terman has long been discredited (though with CRISPR and designer babies, we now face a newer eugenics 2.0 that is more slippery and perhaps even more pernicious). Nonetheless, by taking the very ethnicity that Terman singled out (i.e., Hispanics) and showing that its members could “master abstractions” such as calculus, Escalante provided as stark a refutation and counterexample to Terman as could be desired. In light of Escalante, Terman showed himself to be not a scientist but a bigot who uncritically accepted the stereotypes of his age.
Eugenicists and proponents of early intelligence testing, like Terman, used the term “moron” as a supposedly scientific designation for individuals with low IQ scores. Accordingly, morons could be justly excluded from advanced education and, once public sensibilities were suitably reshaped, even be restricted in their reproduction.
Those like Terman divided the world into the elite upper classes and the moronic lower classes. The dynamic was one of superior versus inferior. Thus, the moronic masses were excluded from a superior education because elites regarded them as incapable of profiting from it. Indeed, why subject the morons to the frustration of trying to learn something they are inherently incapable of learning? Arrogance, pride, and condescension motivated the elite in this attitude.
In our day, this sort of racism is no longer tolerated. Yet a so-called “antiracism” is today tolerated and even embraced. This antiracism is in fact a racism of low expectations. It is rationalized in terms of compassion, equity, and (social, not real) justice. It presupposes an essentialism in which different races or groups are claimed to exhibit deep-seated and ineradicable differences. Rather than thinking of humanity as a whole for which racial or group differences are only skin deep, this antiracism not only glorifies such differences but also sees them as fundamentally dividing humanity.
Take, for instance, Luis Leyva, a professor of mathematics education at Vanderbilt University. In early 2023, he delivered a lecture at a large AMS (American Mathematical Society) meeting in Boston titled “Undergraduate Mathematics Education as a White, Cisheteropatriarchal Space and Opportunities for Structural Disruption to Advance Queer of Color Justice.” In that lecture, he claimed to show “how Black, Latin, and Asian QT [Queer-Trans] students’ narratives of experience reflect forms of intersectionality, or instances of oppression and resistance at intersecting systems of white supremacy.”
Leyva is emblematic of Critical Mathematics Pedagogy. This approach to mathematics education traces to the critical theory and Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire. Freire, best known for his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), understood teaching as an act of liberation rather than as a transmission of knowledge. Critical mathematics pedagogy links mathematics to social, political, cultural, and economic contexts of oppression. It claims to unmask how math both reflects and reinforces power structures, critiques the ways it is used to sustain inequity, and emphasizes connecting such a critique to concrete action for justice and reform.
Suffice it to say that if the conventional teaching of calculus, as practiced by Jaime Escalante, oppresses marginalized groups — as Critical Mathematics Pedagogy would say it does — then it needs to be suppressed. In that case, Escalante, instead of being a hero, becomes a tool of white supremacism. For him or anybody to teach calculus to Hispanic or African-American students would then be to impose a white form of learning on them. Because different races are thought to have different aptitudes and predispositions, it would be racist to impose a form of learning devised by one race on another.
Unlike the old racists like Terman, whose racism was hierarchical, with some races deemed superior to others, the new antiracism is egalitarian. Different races are just different, but the differences are so fundamental that they must be respected, and to disrespect them is to be a hater and oppressor. Accordingly, someone like Escalante, who saw everybody as fair game to be taught calculus, becomes a victimizer of those whose race has rendered them unsuited for learning calculus or for being subjected to its teaching.
The practical outworking of both the old racism and the new antiracism, however, is the same. People, on account of their race, need to be excluded from certain courses of education. The old racists justified the exclusion by deeming the excluded inferior. The new antiracists justify the exclusion by deeming the excluded different. But at the end of the day, the sound and valuable education that people might otherwise have received doesn’t happen.
One subtlety with the new antiracism is that the exclusion from a top-quality education doesn’t have to be explicitly enforced. In the old racism, the so-called morons would be forcibly excluded from a top-quality education because they were officially identified as stupid and thus as incapable of profiting from such an education — no need to waste time and money on them.
In the new antiracism, all it takes is to lower standards and expectations sufficiently so that students fail to learn the prerequisites for more difficult subjects and thus naturally exclude themselves from a top-quality education. One approach actively blocks the path to achievement and mastery. The other redirects it away from the path to achievement and mastery. The end result is the same.
Escalante had no patience for either the old racism or the new antiracism (which, in an Orwellian twist, is of course itself a form of racism — a racism of low expectations that disproportionately harms certain races, ethnicities, and socioeconomic classes). Whatever their guise or rationalization, low expectations were anathema to Escalante. He was implacable in defying low expectations. He insisted on proving them wrong.
As this biography shows, if anyone had reason to wallow in feeling oppressed, it was Escalante. A Bolivian immigrant who had successfully taught mathematics in his home country, he had a difficult time getting educators here in the US to take him seriously as a math teacher, much less to give him the opportunity to teach mathematics — though ultimately he prevailed.
As Henry Gradillas makes clear in his interview (Appendix 2), neither he nor Escalante had any interest in casting themselves as victims or trying to profit from victim status. Both could easily have done so. Yet to do so would have hindered them from doing the valuable work they were called to do with their students. You can embrace your and others’ victimhood or you can help yourself and others to transcend victimhood, but you cannot do both. Either one or the other will be your master. Escalante and Gradillas understood this better than anyone.
Low Expectations as Dereliction of Duty
In the previous section, I described two ideological currents used to justify low expectations for students and their education. Yet even without ideology driving low expectations, K–12 public education in America is infested with low expectations and in desperate need to raise them. As I write this in the fall of 2025, the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading scores for 12th graders have just come in, and they’re the worst they’ve been since 1992. In reading, only 35 percent of 12th graders scored at or above NAEP’s Proficient level, while 32 percent scored below NAEP’s Basic level — an all-time high for below-Basic. In math, only 22 percent of 12th graders reached Proficient, and 45 percent scored below Basic — likewise an all-time high for below-Basic. Just to be clear, “all-time high” here means bad.
Economist Gale Pooley (a friend of mine and coauthor of Superabundance — read it!) is a master at estimating the costs of goods and services in dollar amounts. He notes that Americans spend about $1 trillion annually to educate 55 million K–12 students, averaging $18,000 per pupil per year, which over 13 years amounts to $234,000 per student. With a high school graduation rate near 90 percent, he argues the effective cost per graduate rises to $260,000, though before considering proficiency. As just noted, the 2025 NAEP results show only 35 percent of 12th graders proficient in reading and 22 percent in math, averaging to 28.5 percent, or about one in 3.5 graduates. Adjusted for proficiency, Pooley calculates the cost of producing a proficient graduate at $912,281. Moreover, with lingering Covid-related learning losses, he sees the actual number exceeding $1 million. That’s 13 years of a Harvard education paying full sticker price.
With most K–12 students in the US attending public schools, these numbers suggest anything but a success story for American public-school education. How could we be spending so much for primary and secondary education (more than any other nation per pupil) and be getting so little in return? Many have written cogently on this topic, and I don’t want to rehash what has been written elsewhere on it except to offer a few observations.
Certain dominant themes play into America’s overspending and underperforming educational system. The legacy of Thomas Dewey and progressives in valuing self-expression over getting down to business and learning what needs to be learned is one theme. Another theme is experimentation with and perseveration in new-fangled approaches to learning, subsequently shown to have failed, over proven old-school methods. Hence the disaster of the whole language approach to reading despite the proven track record of phonics. Hence the proliferation of methods for “understanding” arithmetic that neither require memorizing the times tables nor ensure the ability to do arithmetic without a calculator.
The fact is, in the absence of an explicitly self-defeating ideology (such as IQ testing, meant to reserve a good education and high expectations only for the elite), most K–12 schools in the US say they want their students to excel—and certainly to meet the NAEP’s proficiency standards. At the very least, they pay lip service to high expectations. None of them will proudly advertise that their students are falling behind. So why do they, protestations to the contrary aside, in practice embrace low expectations?
In answering this question, we need to be careful not to paint with too broad a brush. Many public school systems exist in the US whose students do very well and place into top colleges and universities. These schools are often in more affluent communities where parents and community leaders are committed to maintaining high standards for their schools. The people running these schools defy low expectations as a matter of course and hold accountable those who would inflict low expectations on their children.
The NAEP scores recounted above as well as international scores of student achievement (such as PISA — Programme for International Student Assessment), which show the U.S. lagging educationally, are averages that don’t capture the variability in educational quality across America. In statistical terms, they give the mean but not the variance. The variance in American education is huge, and if we focused on performance from our best public schools (even leaving aside charter schools), I suspect we would be fully competitive with the rest of the world.
The question remains, with public school education urged on all sides to give students a quality education, and minimally to meet proficiency standards, why do so many school systems continue to embrace low expectations? One hears many rationalizations: Bureaucratic inertia. The stranglehold of teachers’ unions, which reward seniority and job security (tenure), over teaching excellence. Breakdown of the family. Poverty. Lack of parental involvement. Etc.
In the end, however, for public schools to embrace low expectations represents a dereliction of duty. We know that circumstances do not render public schools helpless in raising expectations and achieving excellence. Even schools in areas with the worst social problems can do right by their students and empower them to learn in impressive ways, far exceeding proficiency standards. And I’m not talking here about the need to clone a teaching superstar such as Jaime Escalante. There are proven ways for delivering a sound education even in the face of hardship and deprivation.
Consider, for instance, Harvard economist Roland Fryer, writing in the Wall Street Journal (September 8, 2025):
In Houston, a research project I led called Apollo 20 showed it was possible to erase the racial achievement gap in less than two years, by applying simple reform principles to the worst-performing schools. Today, the tools we used sit on the shelf — not because they failed, but because leaders failed to act. We are watching temporary setbacks calcify into permanent inequality, even though we know how to reverse them.
I’ve been obsessed with fixing American schools for most of my career. In 2009 I told my team of research assistants and project managers that we would do it by 2025… Fifteen years later, many of the ideas that once filled our conversations are gone—not because they failed, but because the system walked away from them.
In 2012, my graduate student Will Dobbie and I collected unprecedented data from nearly 50 New York City charter schools to see which practices truly boosted student learning. Class size and teacher credentials — political obsessions for decades — mattered little. What mattered most were five concrete, replicable practices: more instruction time, high expectations, frequent teacher feedback, data-driven instruction, and high-dosage tutoring. Together, these five tenets explained roughly half the difference between effective and ineffective schools.
In Houston, Roland Fryer’s Apollo 20 project, launched in the 2010–11 school year, proved that the racial achievement gap could be erased in less than two years by applying the five simple reforms he mentions, yielding extraordinary gains, such as four extra months of math learning annually in elementary schools and nearly eight months in secondary schools. Yet despite these unprecedented results, funding was withdrawn once the schools were no longer the district’s worst, upon which the program collapsed. Within a decade, the Texas Education Agency took control of Houston’s schools. Consequently, Houston demonstrated the promise of large-scale, replicable reform, only to squander it through bureaucratic corruption, shortsighted politics, and failure of will, leaving students once again adrift in a system that knows what works but refuses to implement it.
In parallel with Fryer’s conclusions, Claremont education professor Mary Poplin published an article titled “Highly Effective Teachers in Low-Performing Urban Schools” (Kappan Magazine, February 2011). Summarizing a study led by her, Poplin described tracking 31 highly effective teachers working in nine low-performing schools in Los Angeles County. Despite serving students in economically depressed neighborhoods, these teachers consistently produced achievement gains far beyond their peers. What set them apart were six key practices:
- strictness that students recognized as purposeful and rooted in care,
- instructional intensity with little wasted time and constant engagement,
- movement around the classroom to monitor, assist, and build relationships,
- traditional, explicit instruction focused on state standards and clear expectations,
- exhorting virtues such as responsibility, persistence, respect, and linking success to future goals, and
- strong, respectful relationships that conveyed high expectations without excuse-making.
Interestingly, these practices described by Poplin don’t just repeat but rather complement the practices described by Fryer. Together with the practices he lists, they likely account for most of the difference between effective and ineffective teaching.
Poplin’s study found that these teachers’ effectiveness had little to do with credentials or trendy instructional fads and everything to do with discipline, clarity, and optimism about students’ potential. They rejected excuses based on background, focused relentlessly on core academic and character formation, and consistently reminded students of their futures beyond the classroom. Rejecting helplessness, they gave students hope.
The upshot was that students were engaged, respected their teachers, and made measurable academic gains. Poplin’s research suggests that expensive reforms or fashionable pedagogies are less effective than the kind of disciplined, respectful, and explicit teaching practiced by these high performing teachers.
Bottom line: Schools that give in to low expectations have no excuse. The path forward to an effective education is clear and proven. Escalante and Gradillas took that path in the 1980s. Others have taken it as well, with clear success. It can be done. It may mean running against strong headwinds. But for teachers and administrators to reject the path to academic success for their students is a dereliction of duty.
Postscript: A postscript needs to be added here. Dereliction of duty to provide the best for our children’s education is never an innocent oversight or excusable failure. It should properly be regarded as criminal negligence and malfeasance against our children and their future. The ultimate cost to our nation in loss of productivity, criminality, incarceration, addiction, mental illness, and premature death because of the failure of our public schools to properly educate our children is enormous.
But don’t take my word for it. The U.S. Department of Education has said as much. In 1983, it published the National Commission on Excellence in Education’s report titled A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. That report is best remembered today for the following remark: “If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” This warning applies as much today to US education as it did forty years ago.
Calculus and the Challenge Zone
A word is in order about why Escalante focused his energies on calculus. Escalante was a math teacher, so it followed that his impact as a teacher would be in teaching mathematics. Calculus, particularly in its AP form, is the highest level of mathematics taught in most high schools. To master calculus and prove that one has mastered it therefore demonstrates a high level of achievement at the high school level. Given his desire to see his students excel and given his expertise in mathematics, it therefore followed that Escalante would focus his energies on AP calculus.
In an alternate universe, could Garfield High have achieved national recognition by having an Escalante double whose students excelled in AP physics, or AP chemistry, or AP American History, or AP English? Perhaps. I don’t mean to overemphasize STEM. But I doubt that high achievement on any other single AP exam would have generated comparable excitement to that generated by outstanding performance on the AP calculus exam.
Perhaps here I’m simply betraying my own bias as a mathematician. But all STEM subjects find their foundation in the “M” that appears in the acronym “STEM,” namely, in mathematics. Mathematics is the language of STE, leaving off the M — science, technology, and engineering. Also, there’s a sense in which the humanities and social sciences are more widely accessible and less intimidating than mathematics as such. One doesn’t hear of history phobias or English phobias, but one does hear of math phobias. Success at math thus suggests the more impressive level of performance.
So, while an Escalante of English literature is conceivable, the Escalante in the actual world, in providing proof of concept that poor Hispanic kids could rise to the highest academic challenges, was providentially a teacher of calculus. Implicit in Escalante getting his students to pass the AP calculus was an a fortiori argument, an argument from the stronger to the weaker: if Escalante’s students could master calculus, they could master anything. Mastery of mathematics was a huge confidence booster for Escalante’s students.
Any story about Escalante will necessarily give pride of place to mathematics — he was, after all, a math teacher. It would be a tragedy, however, if this book merely motivated math teachers to achieve extraordinary levels of mastery with their students to the exclusion of teachers working in other disciplines. Escalante has an important lesson to teach all teachers. To see this, we need to step back a bit and consider the type of teaching that Escalante was doing to get his students to excel in mathematics generally and calculus in particular.
Defying low expectations and insisting on high expectations, Escalante strove for his students to master calculus. Or, if there wasn’t enough time because of their lack of background to get them up to speed for calculus, his goal was to make as much progress as possible in helping them master the lower levels of mathematics that were prerequisite to calculus. But what did the day-to-day training of his students look like?
Performance psychologists, such as K. Anders Ericsson (see his 2016 book Peak), distinguish three zones of learning: a comfort zone, a challenge zone, and a panic zone. The best learning happens in the challenge zone, where students are challenged to stretch themselves, feeling neither underchallenged in a comfort zone or overchallenged in a panic zone. The comfort zone is too easy. It merely repeats things that were a challenge in the past but are no longer a challenge. The panic zone is too hard. It makes things so difficult that no incremental successes are possible. In the challenge zone, things can get uncomfortable but not so uncomfortable that no progress can happen.
Escalante, as much as possible, kept his students in the challenge zone. And indeed, all effective teachers keep, as much as possible, their students in the challenge zone. This is the zone where what Ericsson calls “deliberate practice” happens. It is not easy practice. It is often tedious practice, doing drills and routines that are no fun. But it is the type of practice that in the end pays huge dividends. Learning in the challenge zone is resistance training. Indeed, all effective learning is resistance training! This is as much true in athletic development as mental development.
We all know from other contexts about the need for deliberate practice, which only happens in a challenge zone. Consider, for instance, the game of golf. After learning its rules and taking a few lessons, the average golfer tends to improve mainly by playing with others, gaining familiarity with the flow of the game and picking up small tips along the way. However, this improvement eventually plateaus because the golfer is only repeating existing habits rather than refining them. Without deliberate practice — such as systematically working on putting, driving accuracy, or swing mechanics—the player reinforces the same mistakes and fails to push specific skills to a higher level. As a result, casual play alone yields diminishing returns whereas meaningful advancement requires targeted, intentional effort, which is to say deliberate practice in a challenge zone.
Note that all high school sports follow this pattern, with player development depending crucially on deliberate practice. Note also that no one who decries academic excellence as emblematic of white supremacy decries athletic excellence on the same grounds. Yet the learning principles for achieving peak performance are the same in both academics and athletics. If there is an advantage that athletics has over academics here, it is that athletic improvement tends to be more readily observable because performance statistics are meticulously recorded and can be seen to vary in real time. If academic improvement could be as carefully measured and tracked over time (which it can with contemporary technologies), we could get the same real-time record of achievement for academics as for athletics.
In any case, Escalante was all about keeping his students in the challenge zone, engaged in deliberate practice. This is how, day to day, he defied low expectations and kept his students’ eyes on the prize. This is how all teachers and administrators, regardless of discipline or grade level, can experience the same type of success that Escalante achieved. The problem is to determine the sweet spot—where students are challenged at just the right level to make the greatest progress. This is a moving target because learning is dynamic, with things that seemed difficult one day becoming easier the next day and routine thereafter. Wisdom in teaching is knowing how to move instruction in tandem with that target. Escalante and Gradillas were exemplary in how they exercised that wisdom. This book was written help readers, especially educators, to do the same.
Choosing the Harder Path
In closing this 2025 preface, I need to stress a final crucial point: defying low expectations admits no exceptions. In conversations about education reform, one hears talk about no excuses and zero tolerance. Typically the point of such talk is that some boundaries are so inviolable that for students to cross them requires drastic intervention and discipline. Such boundaries do exist, like students threatening or disrespecting their teachers.
But defying low expectations is not about imposing draconian measures on students, teachers, or administrators. Students, especially, need grace because they are young, green, and mistake-prone. Rather, the point about defying low expectations is that anyone in education always needs, as much as possible, to resist lowering expectations, whether in regard to the learning of students, the teaching of teachers, or the administering of administrators. It matters not whether you justify lowered expectations in the lofty moral terms of compassion, self-esteem, or equity. Once you begin to tolerate lowered expectations, the education you offer is on the path to mediocrity, under-achievement, oblivion.
Of course, some caveats apply. We don’t want to set impossibly high expectations, as typified by the overbearing parent who berates a child for getting “only” an A rather than an A+. Nor should we set expectations for classroom discipline so severely that minor infractions born of immaturity rather than defiance bring down the wrath of heaven. High expectations need to be set to encourage success, not to underscore failure.
That said, we need to be clear that to follow the example of Escalante is to choose the harder path. Defying low expectations is the harder path. It offers great promise of return. But it comes at a personal cost, and often with nasty opposition from those eager to take the easier path and insist that others join them: “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” (Matthew 7:13–14, NIV) Escalante gave us a blueprint for academic success. You’ll find that blueprint in this book. But can you be honest with yourself about how serious you will be in following this blueprint?
At a total cost of about $1 trillion annually, American K–12 education is big business. There’s a lot of money in it. It’s therefore unsurprising that education attracts many grifters who want some of that money, yet without delivering educational value. The easy road is easier. Teachers need to exert more effort to get students to learn than to sit back and watch them fail. Teachers’ unions are appropriately named: they look out for the interests of teachers first and foremost — not the students. They consider it a job well done when mediocre teachers with seniority are able to keep their jobs at the expense of excellent but more junior teachers. In education, the forces of corruption are thus always in play to lower expectations.
William James, in his Briefer Course on psychology, notes that we find it easier in the abstract to recognize good things than in the concrete messiness of life. To illustrate this point, he describes a Russian lady at the theater. She weeps over the fictitious people experiencing tragedy on stage. Yet she is oblivious to her coachman who freezes to death on his seat outside. According to James, this sort of thing happens everywhere, though rarely with such force and clarity.
The point? Nobody I know who has watched Stand and Deliver regards Escalante as a villain or cheers on those in the film who try to thwart him. Yet the real-life Escalante was hard-nosed, wouldn’t take no for an answer, and experienced serious opposition. It’s easy to pat ourselves on the back and assure ourselves that when push comes to shove, we would have had Escalante’s back. But if people universally had Escalante’s back, his legacy would not need to be retold, as in this book.
The path forward is clear. We have the power to take it. Taking it brings immense reward. But it’s not easy. And many prefer the easier path.
Cross-posted at Bill Dembski on Substack.