Education isn’t always a guarantee, especially in less privileged areas that are underfunded, overlooked, and underprioritized, in the belief that these kids wouldn’t amount to much in the end. That being said, sometimes, what changes that fate is having a teacher that believed in his students and encouraged them to learn more than what they were expected. Stand and Deliver is a dramatization of the real life Jaime Escalante, who transformed a math program in an east LA high school to the point where his entire class ace California’s calculus test. The film definitely takes some dramatic liberties, but it does capture a sense of his quiet determination, the personality that pushed him to believe in and connect with students differently. While Escalante’s program eventually ended due to admin changes and staff in-fighting, Stand and Deliver is a reminder of the importance of nurturing ganas, or desire, in the classroom.

We’ve seen great films about teaching, like Dead Poets Society, Coach Carter, and School of Rock, but Stand and Deliver is based on a real person. It was probably made to inspire the rest of America’s education system, but the film does focus a lot on Escalante’s personality that it seems like it suggests that results like this can only happen due to it. To a certain extent, it’s true– his out-of-the-box thinking allowed him to conceive of possibilities for his students– but the film hasn’t identified what has allowed him to create said program, the conditions that allowed the program to happen. And frankly, identifying these factors is important for the current American education system, especially with the math and reading scores hitting an all-time low in decades.