Stand and Deliver

This is an edition of "Movies on Mondays" where we screen a movie that is directly (and sometimes indirectly) related to education. We share the lessons learned and assign a grade. You can find all of these posts on the Resources page under the Movies on Monday heading.


Stand and Deliver- Perhaps this is not the highest quality film-making or greatest acting but I think nearly everyone has seen this movie and remembers it well.

Actor: James Olmos

As the uninspiring trailer proclaims that someone needed to stand up. Garfield High-school in LA was a stereotypical inner-city school.

The students didn't care about school and the teachers had a pretty high burnout rate. Bring in Jaime Escalante, who cares about the kids and their education.

It is not easy but Mr. Escalante succeeds in turning aroung the attitudes of the students.

In fact, he gets them to take an AP course. The students do well in the course and nearly all pass the AP exam.

Their success was so unprecedented that the testing administers suspect foul play (cheating had to take place, it is under privileged students who have never performed well before... this kind of turnaround is impossible.)

After much protest the students and Mr. Escalante agree to re-test. They still pass. (Probably would not have become a movie had they not)

Escalante does not attribute the turn around at Garfield high school to himself or the students but the motivating factor of gannas.

Gannas is a spanish term for desire or the will to succeed.

Without this gannas the students at Garfield would not have passed the AP exam. They displayed an amazing work ethic and tremedous commitment to that success.

Mr. Escalante had as much gannas to see them all succeed as they had for themselves.

The lessons from Stand and Deliver:

1. Mr. Escalante did not give his students gannas, they already possessed it. He only showed them how to access and utilize it to achieve their goals. We all have gannas inside of us for different passions and pursuits.
2. Success is not bound by race, gender, socio-economic status, or opportunities. Anyone can be a success with the right attitude and the right support systems around them. That being said, the aforementioned factors can affect the difficulty of success.
3. Teaching is hard. It wasn't the amount of math that Mr. Escalante knew that made him such a good teacher, although that is important. The fact that he made a personal commitment to his students and showed him he cared made as big of influence on the students at Garfield as did his teaching.