Escalante: The Best Teacher in America.

• Author: Monroe, Sylvester

Escalante: The Best Teacher in America. Jay Matthews. Henry Holt, $19.95. These days almost any kind of educational success story out of an inner-city school invariably prompts an outpouring of superlatives. "Miraculous!" "Marvelous!" "Extraordinary!" To some extent, landing a teacher with the professional skills and personal determination of Jaime Escalante on the doorsteps of one of the worst schools in Los Angeles might be considered something of a miracle. But what the middle-aged Bolivian immigrant did there with a group of underprivileged, Hispanic students, while wondrously uncommon in the low-achievement world of public education, was by no means supernal.

What he did, taking 18 seniors from East Los Angeles's gang-ridden James A. Garfield High School through the successful completion of the Educational Testing Service's Advanced Placement Calculus Exams in 1982, has of course practically become legend. It has earned him welldeserved honors from the barrios of East Los Angeles to the White House and been the subject of a wellreceived motion picture called Stand and Deliver But not until Matthews's fascinating, but rather unlikely, book (How many books get written about real-life high-school teachers?), have we been offered a full account of this remarkable tale of modern-day life in a Latino ghetto.

Matthews, the Los Angeles bureau chief of The Washington Post, first heard of Escalante seven years ago through a newspaper article about 14 Garfield students suspected of cheating on the AP calculus exam. What struck him as unbelievable was not so much the report of cheating (later proven false) but that a school like Garfield-where the student body is 95 percent Latino, 85 percent poor, and mostly from families where their parents never graduated from high school-could produce even one student capable of passing the renownedly difficult test. Who was this man, Escalante, Matthews wanted to know, and how could he have accomplished so much with seemingly so little?

Matthews's search led him all the way back to Escalante's childhood in Bolivia. There he discovered an Horatio Alger story of sons in the teacher's own life. As a bright but mischievous child, Escalante had been forced to overcome an abusive, heavy-drinking father on the way to becoming a celebrated, top teacher at some of the best schools in Bolivia. But when he came to America, looking to broaden his professional and personal horizons, he mus told that his Bolivian degree...