Defying Low Expectations: What Jaime Escalante Taught Us About Learning, William A. Dembski, Alex Thomas, Inkwell Press, 2026, pp. 427, $25.
Every so often we need to be reminded of Jaime Escalante, the indefatigable high school math teacher played by the actor Edward James Olmos in the popular 1987 movie, Stand and Deliver. Escalante, who lived from 1930 to 2010. showed us what was possible given the right circumstances.
Escalante was wildly successful in increasing his students’ knowledge of mathematics. They came from at-risk backgrounds and entered high school at the pre-algebra level or lower. In three years, most of them would pass the Advanced Placement Calculus exam for advanced college credit. In the year 1987, 27 percent of all Mexican American students in America who passed AP Calculus were students in Jaime Escalante’s program.
Defying Low Expectations celebrates Escalante’s embrace of lofty but righteous challenges and critiques educational defeatism from both right and left, the former as exemplified by late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ Social Darwinist racial/ethnic prejudice, and the latter as exemplified by victimization culture and anti-racist and critical theories.
Defying Low Expectations serves at least four purposes: 1. It reminds us of what is possible in education, lest we forget and succumb to defeatism ourselves; 2. It summarizes earlier books on the topic, one written by journalist Jay Mathews (1988) and the other by Escalante’s principal, Henry Gradillas, along with ESL educator Jerry Jesness (2010)1; 3. It adds some more recent material made available since 2010, mostly from additional interviews of Escalante’s colleagues, and; 4. It considers how Escalante might have responded to some of today’s educational issues were he alive and teaching today.
Some of the adults who participated in Jaime Escalante’s success have now passed away. I was saddened but fortunate, for example, to attend the funeral service two years ago of Escalante’s intrepid mathematics advisor at Cal State-Los Angeles, Wayne Bishop. Fortunately, the authors were able to interview most of Escalante’s closest colleagues before 2016, accumulating some of their postscript material from the office of the short-lived Escalante-Gradillas Teacher Prize, which promptly disappeared from the internet when the sponsoring organization was purchased by another. Defying Low Expectations serves to archive some of it.
Consequently, however, the book seems a rough, uneven compilation at times, with a preface, a foreword written by Gradillas in 2016, an afterword written by a third author, and four appendices, one an interview with the neurosurgeon, presidential candidate, and U.S. Secretary of Housing & Urban Development, Ben Carson. Carson was not a part of Escalante’s history, but his rags-to-riches story seems similar.
Furthermore, some paragraphs in the main text are repeated verbatim in the appendices (as author Dembski forewarns in the preface). Some assertions by the authors in one part of the book contradict those by others in other parts of the book. Overall, however, the book is earnest, thoughtful, and well-written. It is a worthwhile read, especially for those born after the celebrity and fame of Kemo Sabe (Escalante’s student-given nickname) waned. For older folk who missed the attention given to Escalante’s story at the time, Defying Low Expectations may serve well to quickly update you, given its lengthy summaries of the earlier books, events, and the movie, Stand and Deliver.
Jaime Escalante was special, but not unique in his pedagogical beliefs and methods. The authors briefly review the work and legacy of several others who succeeded in the classroom with high expectations and direct, no-nonsense instruction, such as Marian Joseph, Marva Collins, and Thaddeus Lott. Lott emphasized that “achievement builds self-esteem, not the other way around.”
Still, Escalante pushed himself beyond a limit few teachers would tolerate, working sixty hour weeks, maintaining constant contact with parents, eternally scrounging for extra resources, pushing students to drop all non-academic activities, and losing patience with colleagues who stood in his way.
Defying pulls in a variety of relevant research concepts to help explain Escalante’s success. For example, the “three zones of learning: a comfort zone, a challenge zone, and a panic zone” of Anders Ericsson, performance psychologist and author of Peak: Secrets From the New Science of Expertise (2016). Escalante excelled in working the full range of the challenge zone.
The authors cite the Harvard economist Roland Fryer and the Claremont education professor Mary Poplin to itemize the essential characteristics of the pedagogy of Escalante and his supportive principal Henry Gradillas. Roughly combining their two lists:
- Strict discipline and clear rules of behavior.
- Instructional intensity, and extra instructional time—that which is necessary to master the material at hand. Time is adjusted to fit the instruction needed, not vice versa.
- Frequent teacher feedback, movement around the classroom, answering individual questions, checking students’ progress.
- Traditional, explicit, teacher-directed instruction. Little time wasted on constructivist projects or group learning activities.
- Exhorting time-honored virtues: hard work, responsibility, tenacity, honesty.
- Strong and respectful relationships; teachers respect every student with genuine optimism about their futures. Teachers constantly push students.
One can find similar lists in the extensive effective schools’ research literature of the latter half of the twentieth century. Its most succinct finding: the most academically successful schools focus on academics (and not sports, buildings, student self-esteem, group equity, etc.), with the principal serving primarily as an academic team leader. As with much educational wisdom, sound pedagogical guidance is and has long been available. It is either ignored, or difficult to isolate amid a morass of feel-good platitudes and faddish pseudo-science.
There exists such a confusing abundance of bad faith and obfuscation in education research, it can be difficult for outsiders, such as the authors, to recognize the sincere and useful amid the cacophony of deliberate diversion. Language can be tortured to fit biases and self-interests, changing some terms to mean the opposite of what they mean in normal usage.
In the book’s middle, the authors get lost in this morass themselves, endorsing policies proposed by progressive educators who likely would have opposed Escalante and his methods had they been at Garfield High in the 1980s. Such progressive luminaries as Linda Darling-Hammond, Iris Rotberg, Michael Rose, Robert Schaeffer of Fairtest, and Lani Guinier offer education policy advice. Source material emanates from NEA Today, the Phi Delta Kappan, and Edutopia.
Incongruously, Finland—long a favorite of progressive reformers—is held up as a model of teacher training and instruction. Yet one is far more likely to find an Escalante-like teacher in Korea, Japan, or Singapore than in Finland, which shifted sharply from traditional to progressive methods and, with a predictable lag, saw its performance on international assessments decline.
Some teachers and education professors arrive in the book from diverse parts to deliver standard progressive education narratives and anti-testing tropes. Who are these people and why are they here? Perhaps they were involved in Escalante-Gradillas Teacher Prize activities in the early 2010s? Most of the interviews date in the citations to that time period. It could also be that the authors succumbed to the “sunk cost fallacy”: They had these interviews that they gathered in the mid-2010’s. They don’t want to waste them. So, they include them in the book even though they don’t quite fit with the rest of the book’s, and Escalante’s, message.
“Standardized testing will be the downfall of this country,” says one educator. Testing decreases time for creative thinking and collaboration, says another. Other, similar opinions sound annoyingly familiar and contradict the rest of the book.2
The authors seem to recognize the irony that a test was a large part of Jaime Escalante’s and his students’ success. They argue, however, that the AP Calculus test was admissible because it differed from all the others. I would argue that it does in some respects, but not in other respects, to which their interviewees would be just as opposed.
What’s a reader to do? Perhaps be wary of the forty pages hinged around page 200 but enjoy the rest of the 400-page book.
For reasons unexplained, the authors also attempt to offer remedies on a range of education policy issues beyond the Escalante story, such as whole language, charter schools, social media, federalism, and artificial intelligence. Sometimes they succeed in relating these other issues to Escalante; sometimes not. The authors, for example, harbor no doubts that Escalante would have raged against the Common Core (and probably the federal intrusions of the No Child Left Behind Act) and banned smart phones from his classrooms.
One intriguing section speculates on the future of speeded learning. If Jaime Escalante could take at-risk, pre-algebra students to calculus mastery in three years, how fast can we teach students with the aid of computer software and artificial intelligence? Defying showcases the promise of Alpha School and Victoria Garmy’s less expensive but just as speeded StudiaNova.org—three hours a day of instruction.
Can eternally patient AI tutors assume the direction of drills and practice, freeing teachers to manage higher-level and more nuanced and analytical instructional roles? The authors propose some attractive niches, such as Accent and Pronunciation Refinement in Language Learning Speech; Advanced Sight-Reading and Aural Skills for Musicians; Fine Motor and Artistic Skill Development via Gesture Feedback; and Emotional Intelligence and Empathy Training through Simulated Dialogue.
In his foreword, Escalante’s principal, Henry Gradillas, wrote: “Most people think of Escalante as he was depicted in the film Stand and Deliver. That film, however, ends at the pinnacle of Escalante’s time at Garfield. It misses the quick decline that came soon after.” Within five years of a new principal’s arrival at Garfield High, “every teacher and teaching method associated with the controversial and divisive Jaime Escalante would be gone without a trace.”
As author Dembski writes in his preface:
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.
Richard P. Phelps is founder of the Nonpartisan Education Review (http://www.nonpartisaneducation.org); mail@nonpartisaneducation.org. His most recent books are The Malfunction of US Education Policy: Elite Misinformation, Disinformation, and Selfishness (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023); Defending Standardized Testing (Psychology Press, 2005), Standardized Testing Primer (Peter Lang, 2007), and Correcting Fallacies about Educational and Psychological Testing (American Psychological Association, 2009). Phelps appeared in AQ in spring 2025 with “Educating the Autistic: What Works,” a review of Katharine Beals’s Students with Autism: How to Improve Language, Literacy, and Academic Success.
1 J. Mathews, Escalante: The Best Teacher in America, (Henry Holt, 1988); H. Gradillas, J. Jesness, Standing and Delivering: What the Movie Didn’t Tell. With a Foreword by Jaime Escalante, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).
2 E.g., Testing decreases time for creative thinking and collaboration. Tests cannot measure an unwavering resolve to learn. High-stakes testing generates untold stress at enormous cost. A teacher’s most valuable lessons cannot be assessed by questions on a page. It is impossible to reduce the performance of a student to a single number. Tests are prone to error and can measure only a narrow slice of what students know. Education is more than facts and chasing after rote knowledge is a waste of time. The objective of education is happiness, virtue, and the discovery of identity.
Photo by Antony Hyson Seltran on Unsplash