Stand and Deliver: Part II

The day of the AP Calculus Exam rolls around, and the camera pans around the room, showing Escalante's students concentrating on the test that they have spent two years preparing for. The sweat, the tears, the anger, the confusion, the discrimination and distrust...all amounting to this moment. Eighteen students took the test, and eighteen students passed. Mr. Escalante and his students were ecstatic they had done it!

However, shortly after the recognition ceremony for the success on the test, a student gets a call from the officials at Educational Testing Services. Heartbreak is evident by the look on her face. The ETS was accusing the students of cheating. Their reasoning? The students had done too well, too quickly, and had gotten similar questions wrong.

We watch as a righteously angry Escalante storms into the ETS office, asking for proof that his students cheated. When the ‘investigators’ refuse to offer proof, Escalante attempts to explain that perhaps the students got similar questions wrong because they were all using the same exact step-by-step method, taught by him. He also raises the point that if students from a school in Beverly Hills had done this well on a test they would not be under such rigorous investigation. The investigation was not only preposterously misguided, but racially discriminatory! But the investigators refused to see Escalante’s point, and the students were eventually forced to take the test again. With only one day to study, the outcome of the test was uncertain.

Escalante paces back and forth in the school office, waiting for the news. Had they passed? Had these past two years paid off?

YES.

That year, eighteen students passed the AP Calculus exam. In the following years, the number of students passing the exam increased steadily. Escalante and his students achieved their goal, and proved that dedication and persistence can lead to amazing accomplishments.