Stand and Deliver - Plot

Plot

In the area of East Los Angeles, California, in 1982, in an environment that values a quick fix over education and learning, Jaime Escalante is a new teacher at Garfield High School determined to change the system and challenge the students to a higher level of achievement. Leaving a steady job for a position as a math teacher in a school where rebellion runs high and teachers are more focused on discipline than academics, Escalante is at first not well liked by students, receiving numerous taunts and threats.

As the year progresses, he is able to win over the attention of the students by implementing innovative teaching techniques. He is able to transform even the most troublesome teens into dedicated students. While Escalante teaches basic arithmetic and elementary and intermediate algebra, he realizes that his students have far more potential. He decides to teach them calculus. To do so, he holds a summer course of what is implied in the movie as pre-calculus material, such as advanced algebra, math analysis, and trigonometry. Calculus starts in the students' senior year. Despite concerns and skepticism of other teachers, who feel that "you can't teach logarithms to illiterates," Escalante nonetheless develops a program in which his students can eventually take AP Calculus by their senior year, which will give them college credit. This intense math program requires that students take summer classes, including Saturdays from 7:00 AM to noon, taxing for even the most devoted among them.

While other students spend their summers working, Escalante's students learn complex theorems and formulas. The vast contrast between home life and school life, however, begins to show as these teens struggle to find the balance between what other adults and especially their parents expect of them and the goals and ambitions they hold for themselves. Several students must confront issues at home. In a memorable scene, Escalante follows a crying girl as she leaves the classroom and runs through the school. With Escalante to help them, they soon find the courage to separate from society's expectations for failure and rise to the standard that Escalante had set for them. Taking the AP Calculus exam in the spring of their senior year, these students are relieved and overjoyed to be finished with a strenuous year. After receiving their scores, they are overwhelmed with emotion to find that they have all passed, a feat done by few in the state.

Later that summer a shocking accusation is made: the Educational Testing Service calls into question the validity of their scores when it is discovered that similarities between errors are too high for pure chance, and the students are left to deal with the allegations (along with the subsequent revoking of their scores) in their own way. Outraged by the implications of cheating, Escalante feels that the racial and economic status of the students has caused the ETS to doubt their intelligence and confronts officials both at the school and the ETS to challenge the allegations. During the course of his confrontations, Escalante's car is stolen, adding to his despair, only to discover that it was stolen by one of his students to make some improvements to it as a token of gratitude for his service. In order to prove their mathematical abilities and worth to the school, to the ETS, and to the nation, the students agree to retake the test at the end of the summer, months after their last class. The students are given only one day to prepare and Escalante gravely tells them that the test will be harder than the first.

While waiting for a phone call from ETS, Escalante receives word that the computers he was waiting for to teach his computer science class have finally arrived. Finally, Escalante receives word that all the students have passed the second exam, and Escalante tells the school principal that he wants his students' original scores reinstated.