Another article about the full story behind Escalante's amazing success:

"Ganas. That's all you need … ganas," says the whispering Edward James Olmos in "Stand and Deliver," the 1988 film that famously depicts Jaime Escalante and his 18 inner-city math students who leap from fractions to calculus in just two years. "You can't teach logarithms to illiterates," the uptight math department head says, but Olmos' Escalante touts ganas, the desire to succeed, as the single ingredient to his Los Angeles barrio kids' success.

But the real-life tale of Jaime Escalante and his unprecedented Advanced Placement calculus program shows that it takes a bit more than ganas to obliterate the achievement gap between poor kids and rich. Based on his actions, Escalante knew this.

As educators, students, and citizens alike mourn the loss of the beloved math teacher, who died March 30, outpourings of support and sadness understandably veer toward the film: "Loved that movie," wrote a teacher-friend of mine. But Escalante reportedly told Reason magazine in 2002 that the film was "90 percent truth and 10 percent drama." Ah, how crucial that 10 percent is. In a time when American policymakers are arguing left and right about how to salvage the nation's many failing schools, it's worth honoring both Escalante and American students by examining the real strategies used in transforming an underperforming department into a dazzling decade-long flagship.

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