In the modern world,
we ride the crest of a wave.
Every day, innovators discover new and
better ways of meeting our needs.
The greatest innovations are routinely
replicated worldwide,
except in education which has
remained stubbornly at anchor while
the rest of the world has sailed past it.
In the next hour policy analyst Andrew
Coulson explores why our classrooms
have yet to be transformed by a
similar wave,
the same kind of innovative wave that
has revolutionized and improved every
other aspect of our lives.
We crisscross the globe in our search
for answers to the essential question:
How do we attain educational excellence?
In the barrio neighborhood of
East Los Angeles,
a uniquely gifted teacher becomes an
unlikely hero,
showing his Garfield High School
students how to shatter expectations.
He taught us to be strong and to stand
up for what you believe in.
But the same drive and determination
that fueled Jaime Escalante's unparalleled
success with the students of Garfield
High also proved to be his downfall.
He was setting a precedent.
A lot of the teachers were resentful
and it was very public.
5,000 miles away,
in a very different culture,
Andrew Coulson finds an amazing
similarity in the competitive spirit of a
baseball game and what students
must do to get into college.
In my case,
I stay up all night before exams -
maybe during six weeks.
Here, in Seoul, South Korea,
the fierce competition for entrance
to the very best colleges,
paired with cutting edge technology,
has propelled a unique educational
industry to soaring heights.
Ninety-five percent of all South Korean
students attend intensive after-school
tutoring sessions called hagwons.
It is a market, like, it is an entire market,
and the consumer - a student - likes the
product that is better than any others.
So teachers compete within the market
to become, like, entertaining
and educative at the same time.
For the last ten years,
my whole lecture revenue is over 100
million dollars.
Isolated examples of success and
innovation DO occur in education,
but seldom have such examples been
expanded or "scaled up" to improve the
educational systems that serve the
masses - that improve the basic quality
of life, that lift people out of poverty.
Join us as Andrew Coulson explores the
challenge of replicating educational
excellence in "School, Inc."
It's often said that education is
different from other fields.
And there's one respect in which
that's certainly true.
But to really see it, we have to stop
and step back in time to the late 1970s.
Recognize this?
It's the original Sony Walkman,
introduced in 1979,
the first mainstream personal
music player.
And on the eve of its release the
Japanese media were in solid agreement:
they thought it would flop.
Sony itself expected to sell only
about 5,000 a month.
And then a funny thing happened:
people kind of liked it.
Within two years,
Sony had sold a million-and-a-half
Walkmans worldwide,
sparking similar products from other
companies that sold millions more.
But that was just the beginning.
Every year or two,
new and improved models hit the market.
To earn enough to buy the
original Walkman,
you had to work two weeks at a typical
minimum wage job.
And that was for lo-fi sound on
cassettes you had to flip over
every half an hour!
What's really amazing about the rapid
spread and improvement of personal
audio players is that it isn't amazing at all.
It's perfectly normal.
Great new gadgets and services are
appearing and going viral every day.
A decade ago,
no one had ever heard of Google.
Now they do tens of thousands of
internet searches per second.
Facebook went from zero to
half-a-billion members in just 5 years.
And the same thing is true outside the
high-tech world in everything from
organic grocery stores to
disposable diapers.
Basically, invent something good,
and it gets big.
And these days, it gets big FAST.
But of all the products we make and
the services we provide,
there's one that stands out as an
exception to that overall pattern;
one activity in which excellence
doesn't spawn countless imitators or
spread on a massive scale.
And that exception is schooling.
For generations,
there hasn't been a SINGLE innovation
in teaching that has transformed
classrooms and improved student
achievement worldwide.
The closest thing to it can be found here,
inside this 19th century schoolhouse.
Let's have a look.
And here it is: the blackboard.
For the first two-thousand years of
education history,
it was hard for teachers to
communicate complex visual information
to groups of students.
Wax tablets,
like the one shown in this
Greek vase painting, had been
around since the 5th century B.C.
And that's how children learned to
write...etching letters into the wax,
rubbing them out, and starting over.
Useful as they were,
they didn't allow teachers to reach
the whole class all at once.
Twenty centuries later,
we'd made the great leap forward to
these: slate tablets and chalk.
Bit of an improvement -
certainly they're easier to erase,
but it wasn't until the late 1700s
that a Scottish schoolmaster named
James Pillans had a really clever idea:
He took all of those tablets off
of students' laps and he hung them
together on the wall.
Suddenly, every student could see
exactly what Pillans was talking about
at the same time.
In a flash, the blackboard leapt across
the Atlantic to the United States
Military Academy at West Point.
And just a few decades later,
it was a common item even in remote
rural schoolhouses, like this one.
So there's an example of a brilliant
educational idea - simple and effective
- that took the world by
storm in barely a generation.
We know it CAN happen.
But that was 200 years ago,
and nothing quite like it has
happened since.
Why haven't our classrooms been
transformed by that same pattern of
improvement and innovation that we
take for granted in every other aspect
of our lives?
It's not that we haven't tried.
Schools have adopted all sorts of new
technologies over the years,
from projectors, to personal computers,
to "smart" white boards.
The trouble is that none of these new
inventions has improved outcomes -
measurable outcomes - on a global scale.
Let's take a look at something.
American test scores at the end of
high school have been flat since we
started keeping track of them all the
way back in the early 1970s,
and the same thing is true in most
other countries as well.
Basically, educational quality has
been stuck in the era of disco and
leisure suits for 40 years,
while the rest of the world has
passed it by.
Classrooms and clothes look a little
different now than they did back then.
But we've changed the trappings of
education without really
improving the substance.
The best schools haven't grown and
taken over the less successful ones.
The best teaching methods haven't been
replicated on a mass scale.
And while our top athletes and pop
stars reach huge audiences,
our greatest teachers seldom reach
more than a few dozen kids at a time,
despite all our technological advances.
Why not?
That's the question at the
heart of this series:
why doesn't excellence scale
up and spawn imitators in education,
the way it does in other fields?
We'll travel the globe in search of an
answer to that question.
And we'll take a few detours
along the way,
because the shortest route isn't
always a straight line.
But maybe we're just being impatient,
and if we wait a few years,
education will catch up to the pace of
progress in other fields.
After all,
the rapid spread of new technologies
and ideas - that's an incredibly
recent phenomenon...isn't it?
To find out, we've come here, to Lowell,
Massachusetts...because in 1821...
it didn't exist.
A local map from that year bears the title:
"A Plan of Sundry Farms etc.
at Pawtucket."
For miles south and east of the
Pawtucket Falls,
this was just agricultural land
incorporated into the nearby
town of Chelmsford.
The one notable man-made
structure was this,
the Pawtucket Canal.
It bypassed the falls and the rapids below.
It allowed lumber and other products
to be transported down the Merrimack
River from its headwaters in New
Hampshire all the way to the
shipyards of Newburyport on the
Massachusetts coast.
Completed in 1796,
it was a pretty sweet racket -
generating a steady revenue
stream from its toll fees.
At least it did until 1803,
when a more popular competitor
opened for business right next door.
So the Pawtucket Canal lost its monopoly
- and a lot of its business
and revenue along with it.
As a result, this whole area
remained a rural backwater
for a generation, population: 200.
Until, in 1821,
something happened that
changed all that.
This!
The owners of the Pawtucket waterway
sold their entire operation -
lock, stock and canal - to the
Boston Manufacturing Company.
Its Founder, Francis Cabot Lowell,
had studied textile factories while
living in England - studied a little
more closely than their owners
seemed to realize.
And thanks to his, well,
industrial espionage,
Lowell was able to recreate a
functioning mechanized mill just
outside Boston.
The machines were powered by belts
connected to rotating shafts
along the ceiling.
Those shafts, in turn, were driven by
a massive fly-wheel in the basement.
And in the early 1800s,
the way you got one of those great big
fly-wheels up to speed was with
one of these...
the same kind of water wheel that had
been driving grain mills in Europe
since the middle ages.
And that's why, after Francis Lowell's death,
his partners brought his mechanized
mill design to the Pawtucket Falls:
it offered enough power to drive
dozens of these wheels.
Other entrepreneurs took a chance and
followed their lead,
and the newly incorporated town of
Lowell quickly went from rural
backwater to the biggest manufacturing
center in North America.
Their gamble paid off.
Making cotton textiles in automated
factories was faster, cheaper,
and more precise than doing it by hand;
so demand went through the roof.
But there was a catch:
in order to meet that demand,
factory owners had to find thousands
of workers willing to take on grueling
12 hour days and 6 day weeks.
As it turned out,
girls and young women flocked to fill
these new factory jobs.
In 1836,
a mill girl named Hannah Wilson wrote to
discourage her friend Mary from coming
to Lowell in search of factory work.
"I think you are better off where you are,
for there is more girls than you can shake
a stick at the Lawrence Corporation."
"Holly Thompson has gone to doing
housework at Doc Hubbard's;
she could not get in the factory
nowhere in Lowell."
Still, the mill owners couldn't
rest on their laurels.
In order to stay profitable and to
stay ahead of the competition,
they had to find new ways to
boost productivity.
And that's why the clever chaps at the
Appleton Mill hired an eccentric,
vegetarian, tee-totaling
engineer named Uriah Boyden.
They asked Boyden to build
them a couple of new, improved,
water wheels...
nothing brilliant about that.
The clever part was to promise Boyden
that the more efficient those wheels
turned out to be, the more he'd get paid.
Well, with an incentive like that,
Boyden did what any good
engineer would do:
he started by copying off
the smartest kids in class.
Boyden studied the latest
French water power systems,
called turbines,
and then modified their intakes
and outlets to bump up efficiency.
His design performed so well that it blew
the old technology out of the water.
In the coming decades,
mills around the country ripped out
their medieval-style water wheels and
replaced them with
ever-more-efficient turbines.
Productivity just kept rising,
and the innovations behind it
spread like wildfire.
The cost of manufactured goods
steadily fell while quality continued
to improve.
It was the dawn of the American
Industrial Revolution, which brings
us back to the reason we visited
Lowell in the first place.
From our vantage point at the
beginning of the 21st century,
it certainly seems as though great new
ideas and innovations were already
scaling-up two hundred years ago.
And that,
with the exception of the blackboard,
education just wasn't keeping up.
Not everyone required the benefit of
historical hindsight to see that.
One man in particular noticed it
at the time.
He was born in 1796,
the same year that the
Pawtucket Canal was completed,
became a lawyer,
was elected to public office,
and eventually served here in the
Massachusetts State House as
president of the Senate.
His name was Horace Mann,
and this is how he saw his state's
fledgling public school system in 1837.
"As the system is now administered,
if any improvement in principals or
modes of teaching is discovered
in one school, instead of being published
to the world, it dies with the discoverer."
"Now, if a manufacturer discovers a new
mode of applying water or steam power...
the information flies over the country
at once; the old machinery is discarded
the new is substituted."
Sound familiar?
Like us,
Horace Mann was frustrated that the
common schools - as public schools
were then known -weren't enjoying the
same spread of innovation that he was
seeing happen all around him,
in places like Lowell.
And so he resolved to do something
about it: to find a way to make
educational excellence go viral.
In 1837, Mann closed his law practice,
resigned his seat in the state legislature,
and became the first head of the first
state board of education in the country.
From that position,
he changed the course of
American history.
But to understand the plan that he
came up with,
we first have to understand what
education was like during Mann's time.
There were common schools all across
New England,
but there was no state or federal
authority dictating what they taught
or who could teach.
It was parents who hired the teachers,
and often picked the textbooks as well.
In fact, to save money,
families sometimes billeted the
teachers in their own homes.
So if little Johnny couldn't read,
figuring out why might be as easy as
walking into the next room.
But all that parent power came
at a price...literally.
If you sent a child to a public school
in the early 1800s,
they sent you something that looked
like this: a bill.
Local education taxes were levied so
that the poorest students could attend
at little or no charge,
but everyone else was expected to
pay tuition fees.
In fact, half to two-thirds
of common school budgets
came from these fees.
Since the public schools weren't
giving education away for free,
parents had an incentive to hop in the
carriage and check out what the
private sector competition had to offer.
And they liked what they saw.
Most students in the early American
republic attended private schools.
Some of them were large academies
enrolling hundreds of students,
but many were also run by
individual teachers.
Anyone who wanted could put out a
shingle and solicit paying pupils.
And finding them was easy;
you could just open up the local paper.
"Miss Boardman informs her friends and
the public that her spring term for
instructing young ladies and misses
commenced on Monday, March 11th."
"Terms: for instruction in reading,
orthography, chirography, arithmetic,
geography, astronomy,
English grammar, rhetoric,
composition, history
and plain needle-work
eight dollars per quarter."
Eight dollars for three months.
Still, that wasn't pocket change
in the 1820s and 30s,
but there were teachers offering
instruction for less than half that amount.
There were also private school
options for the poor,
with free and reduced-price tuition.
Those were run by mutual aid societies,
religious groups, and tradesmen's guilds.
And, unlike today,
many of the larger private academies
received public subsidies,
allowing them to reach a wider
audience than they otherwise would
have been able to.
Competition helped, too.
Just as the opening of the Middlesex
Canal put pressure on the
Pawtucket Canal operators,
the creation of all these new,
small independent schools forced the
larger private academies to lower
their tuition fees.
This jumble of competing private
schools didn't use the same
textbooks or methods,
but it seems to have been effective.
Student enrollment and literacy were
high and rising,
newspaper readership was exploding,
and the standard of living was
improving from one generation
to the next.
None of this was lost on Horace Mann,
or his friend James Carter.
It was Carter who spearheaded the
creation of the State Board of Education,
from his seat in the
Massachusetts legislature.
But before Carter ran for public office,
he ran his own private school.
He'd seen their growing popularity
first-hand, and, like Horace Mann,
he worried that the common schools
were lagging badly.
In fact, Carter wrote for the
Boston Patriot newspaper,
that unless something was done...
"The academies and private schools
will be carried to much greater
perfection than they have been,
while the public free schools will
become stationary or retrograde."
Faced with that prospect,
Carter and Mann devised a plan to
ensure that every child would have
access to the dynamic private
education marketplace.
Okay...I might have made that last bit up.
What they actually did was to try to
get everyone out of the private sector and
into the common schools.
That sounds a little odd when you
think about the way they felt about
common schools versus private schools
- as far as performance went -
but when you understand the way they
thought about parents and government,
it begins to make sense.
Carter in particular thought that the
reason private schools performed so
well was that elite parents chose them.
So if he could get those same elite
parents to send their kids to the
common schools...well,
problem solved!
Much as they respected the educational
decisions of the nation's elites,
they had a pretty dim view of the
average parent.
Referring to young children Carter
had this to say...
"Their whole education,
if it may be called by that name,
is drawn from parental examples,
which are not always the best,
and are oftentimes the most corrupt."
Both men thought that it was wisest to
take control of education out of the
hands of parents and place it into the
hands of state-appointed experts and
state-trained teachers,
which is why we're here on the Battle
Green in Lexington, Massachusetts,
site of the "Shot Heard 'Round the
World" that marked the beginning of
the American Revolution.
Right across the street from this green,
the two reformers kicked off a
revolution in American education,
creating the first state teachers'
college in the country.
State teacher-training was just one
part of their plan.
The common school reformers also
advocated higher state spending,
prohibiting the common schools from
charging tuition,
and gradually centralizing power here
in the state legislature.
They believed that that would allow
the best pedagogical practices
to scale up,
bringing them within reach of
every child.
But there was more to it than that.
Horace Mann, in particular,
believed that the public schools could
transform society for the better.
Horace Mann believed in the
perfectibility of humanity,
and that a well-funded state school
system would achieve that perfection.
Through his tireless campaigning and
inspiring words,
he eventually won the hearts of the
American people.
In the hundred and fifty years since,
we have expanded and funded the public
schools beyond his wildest expectations.
Has it worked?
Here are a few people who can
help us find out.
I've been in banking for about
12 years now;
I'm with Wells Fargo.
When I graduated law school and I
passed the bar exam,
I got a job at the office of the
federal public defender here in LA.
I chose the profession of architecture.
I'm currently the assistant director
of facilities and construction for the
Los Angeles County Office of Education.
The people you've just seen have a lot
in common.
It's not just that they're all high
achievers with successful careers.
Every one of them went to the same
public high school.
This is Beverly Hills High School-
as seen on TV.
Ninety-eight percent of its
seniors graduate,
and virtually all of them go on to college.
Every year,
six hundred of its students take
advanced placement courses,
and virtually all of them pass.
It has more National Merit finalists
and semi-finalists than you can shake
a stick at.
But this isn't where our illustrious
group of high achievers went to
high school.
Taxi!
This is the real alma mater of our
illustrious group:
Garfield High in East L.A.
But in the late 80s, early 90s,
there was something magical
happening at Garfield High School.
I came into the school in 1988;
at the time it was a 3-year high school.
Garfield High School was a fantastic
school while I was there.
There were committed teachers,
there were committed students and
committed parents.
Up until the late 1970s,
it was a pretty typical inner city school.
Test scores were poor and the mostly
low-income Latino students weren't
even offered the most challenging courses.
I would say most of the students in
this particular school come from
economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
We didn't even know we were poor, right?
Like, we had no idea we were these
disadvantaged kids and that
kind of thing.
But by 1988,
more students were passing the
advanced placement calculus test here
at Garfield than at Beverly Hills High.
One out of every four Mexican
Americans who passed AP calculus,
nationwide, attended Garfield.
Why?
Jaime Escalante.
Jaime Escalante.
Jaime Escalante.
"Time?" "Three seconds."
As a teacher, he was fantastic.
You can talk to a number of students
about Jaime Escalante,
and they tell you what a wonderful
teacher he was.
What I could say today is that he had
a major impact in my life.
Each of us remembers the
great teachers,
the ones who touch our lives.
From the time he started teaching at
Garfield in 1974,
Jaime Escalante worked as if his life
depended on the success of his students.
The mathematics program chair -
and driven by Mr. Escalante at the time -
was very rigorous.
There was nothing but excellence
expected of us students.
Hence, we had to step up to the challenge.
I did not want to disappoint him,
and that is something that I think
you'll probably find from other students.
We did not want to disappoint Jaime.
By 1982, the results were
beyond belief, literally.
His students performed so far above
expectations on the AP calculus test
that the Educational Testing Service
suspected cheating and
threw out their scores.
Undaunted, they re-took it and came
through with flying colors a second time.
He taught us to be strong and to stand
up for what you believe in.
Hollywood noticed,
dramatizing the story in the movie
Stand and Deliver.
"This is basic math but basic math is
too easy for you burros -
so I'm going to teach you algebra...
because I'm the champ."
Seeing the movie makes me laugh,
it gives me a lot of memories as to
how it was in the classroom.
The depiction of Mr. Escalante
was right on.
"You ever been to the beach?"
He was a character from the moment he
walked in the door to the hat he wore
every single day.
"A negative times a negative
equals a positive."
Some of the things that were so
striking in that movie is the fact
that he built a relationship with
each one of the students.
He knew them by name,
he knew their story,
and that was not an exaggeration.
He knew our stories.
One of the things I still admire about
him is his ability to continue
teaching even after he was
famous and he had attention.
He was still a teacher at heart,
and he taught me everything I needed
to be prepared for college.
In art as in life, Escalante had a
simple message for his students:
with enough drive and hard work,
the sky was the limit.
Ganas is something that
any of us can attain.
Culturally, it goes to kind of the gut of
who you are in your soul.
The lessons I learned from Jaime,
I apply them every day,
I apply them with my children and I
talk about Jaime and I talk about the
"ganas"--the need to have the desire.
Nothing's for free.
You have to work really hard if you
want to achieve anything.
We lived in a community that is
generally poor, but we are the most
hardworking individuals that
you could find.
And that's exactly what Mr. Escalante
tapped into;
the willingness to work and the
willingness to find that path.
Certainly his students did well on
their high school math tests,
but did they retain what they'd
learned long enough to build it into
successful lives and careers?
It's an important question,
because a lot of technical jobs
require math...especially if you're
reaching for the stars.
This is the Mount Wilson Observatory,
high in the mountains of the
Angeles National Forest.
From this telescope,
Edwin Hubble made observations back
in the 1920s that dramatically changed
our understanding of the universe.
Virtually everyone at the time assumed
that the universe was static.
It was Hubble who showed that it's
continually expanding - giving rise to
the Big Bang Theory for the origin of
space and time.
Needless to say, for this kind of work,
you need a fair bit of math.
I work at JPL...I've been there - actually,
I hired there right out of high school.
I'm a supervisor of the
mechanical integration group.
And what we basically do is
assemble spacecraft.
Mars Science Laboratory is a
beast of a spacecraft.
It's the size of a Mini Cooper.
Say you wanted to build a
laser-packing, rock analyzing,
nuclear powered robot,
strap it to a rocket, and send it to Mars;
would having attended classes with
Jaime Escalante in high school have
helped get you there?
Getting to his classroom was an
incredible experience;
and I don't know how far I would have
gotten without him.
I think my current job had to do with him.
I went to college,
and in college we had 4 calculus
classes to take, 4 levels of calculus;
and then there was still another 3
levels of math classes above that.
And in every one of those classes that
I took - there was always a subject
that I had already learned in Mr.
Jaime Escalante's class in high school.
Of course, engineers and scientists
aren't the only folks who use math.
Nor is Sergio Valdez the only student
who benefitted from his time in
Escalante's classroom.
But what good is a fantastic math
teacher if you want to pursue a career
in fine arts, or journalism, or the law?
I often ask myself why is it that
...even now - I'm 47-years-old -
it's Jaime that I remember the most?
And I think it's because he
inspired me the most.
Okay. So, Jaime Escalante did have
a lasting impact and it reached
beyond the students who were
particularly interested in mathematics.
But he was only one man,
so there was necessarily a limit to the
number of students he could reach, right?
You might think so based on the
nickname that his students gave him:
They called him "Ke-mo" short for...
Ke-mo sah-bee.
"You Ke-mo sah-bee."
"Ke-mo sah-bee?"
"Ke-mo sah-bee" is what the Native
American Tonto character
affectionately called...The Lone Ranger.
Mr. Escalante was very informal
with his students.
He was a kidder, he was a joker.
You know the whole concept of having-
being that familiar with your teacher
is probably one of those things that
defines the personality of the teacher
and the personality of the student.
He made it a point to keep his
classroom interested
And humor is one way he did it.
And having this nickname, Ke-mo,
and calling his students by nickname
was a way that he had,
he made that personal
connection with them.
It was a pretty cool nickname,
but Jaime Escalante wasn't really a
Lone Ranger.
He had a posse.
Escalante partnered with several other
of Garfield's math teachers to create
a program that covered everything from
basic fractions to advanced calculus.
There were other teachers also
that participated,
and that I had a lot of respect for.
And it was with this team that
Escalante created a program
bigger than himself,
able to produce so many high achievers
- even ones who never set
foot in his classroom.
I started teaching here at Griffith
Junior High around the corner
from Garfield.
One of my ex-students,
she was taking a class with Escalante.
One day she said "Mr. V,
you have to meet Escalante,
because you remind me of him."
She arranged the meeting,
and I went there and we sat down after
school for an hour or so.
We talked, and we clicked.
And he said "I want you to come and
work with me.
I want you to be part of my team."
"Louder!"
"A negative times a negative
equals a positive."
"Why?"
The movie Stand and Deliver ends on a
high note with Escalante's students
proving the skeptics wrong.
But the story of his mathematics
program at Garfield does not have a
Hollywood ending.
When the film was released in 1988,
Garfield's math program was bigger and
more successful than ever.
Before I came to Garfield,
I had never heard of Mr. Jaime Escalante.
But sure enough,
as soon as you step foot on campus,
you hear about Mr. Jaime Escalante,
and you hear about the math program.
Every single week there was a new film
crew coming in.
In any other field,
we might expect this combination of
success, scalability, and publicity,
to have catapulted Escalante
to the top of his profession;
or like Hubble's expanding universe,
to have spread all across the country.
That just isn't what happened.
My years were the years of controversy,
where a lot of the teachers were resentful,
and it was very public.
Jaime was the type of person that
wouldn't settle for normal goals.
He had big dreams and he wasn't afraid
to reach for them.
Jaime was relentless and he wanted,
you know the best for the students.
The key problem was that Escalante's
classes were big.
The number of students in the class
worked for him.
He could handle it.
He was setting a precedent.
He was giving the message
to the administrator:
"If Escalante can do it, why not you?"
The union helped Mr. Jimenez,
who was the other calculus teacher,
helped him to believe that he could
run as the chairperson,
and be the chairperson...which he did.
And that was done,
you know, in the background.
They hide it from Escalante.
The union was able to get the votes to
oust Escalante as chairman of the math
department because his success and
fame had started to arouse jealousy.
Maybe they felt that he had
too much power,
too much attention given to him
and his programs.
And, you know,
I could see that happening.
Jealousy and union opposition weren't
the only problems Escalante faced.
He also lost one of his key supporters
with the departure of Principal Henry
Gradillas in 1987.
The new principal was Maria Tostado.
Tostado took over,
and she basically was an outsider,
did not understand what it implied,
you know.
The validity of the program, you know,
how much it meant to Garfield,
to the barrio.
She did not apply herself to
understand that that was the greatest
gift the community had,
and never treasured that.
In 1991, demoted and resented by
many of his colleagues,
Escalante left Garfield High.
I know that when he left,
he did not leave on good terms.
To me it was just tragic...
it was just tragic,
because he was a good man.
All Jaime Escalante ever wanted to do
was to help us achieve our goals.
And if there's anything wrong with that,
I don't see it.
It is very difficult for one person or
two or three to make an impact that
has that ripple effect.
It was amazing stuff that we learned.
And 20 years later,
I know schools have come a long way.
But it was still a big challenge,
it was still a big achievement;
and I'm proud of having been a
part of that.
Nearly two centuries ago,
Horace Mann thought he'd found a way
to bring the greatest teachers and
schools within reach of every child.
But, as Jaime Escalante's
experience illustrates,
we still haven't achieved that goal.
That's the bad news.
The good news is that there are places
where educational excellence
is scaling up,
which is why our next stop is a
baseball game...in South Korea.
Baseball has one of the heaviest
schedules in professional sports.
But the Doosan Bears and the Nexen
Heroes are still giving it their all -
despite the fact that this is a
mid-week game,
and the skies are threatening to
open up any second.
Playing ball isn't all fun and games,
but it has its perks: The top players
on that field are national celebrities,
and they earn big bucks because of
their skill and their hard work.
Wouldn't it be great if the best
teachers earned that same remuneration
and that same recognition?
Well here in Korea, they do.
Okay, not exactly.
The top teachers earn more than the
highest paid professional baseball players.
My whole lecture revenue is over
100 million dollars.
How is that POSSIBLE?
Well, it's an interesting story,
and it reaches back a thousand years.
In 958,
Korea's Goryeo Dynasty started doling
out government jobs to whoever scored
highest on a national service exam.
The subject matter was mainly
Confucian literature and mathematics;
and only the ruling elite could afford
to prepare their children for it.
But it sent a powerful message:
academic excellence was the
road to success.
It wasn't until the late 1800s that
the national service exam was
finally abolished.
And the "hermit kingdom,"
as Korea had been known,
finally started opening up to the
outside world.
But before it got very far on the
road to modernization,
Korea suffered a 40-year occupation
by imperial Japan,
and then the partitioning of the
country after World War II,
and another 3 years of war instigated
by the communist North.
After all that, South Korea was in ruins.
Illiteracy was high.
The infrastructure had been destroyed.
But the nation had two things going
for it: economic freedom,
and the fervent belief that education
was the path to prosperity.
Schooling exploded...first elementary,
and then secondary.
But the creation of colleges
couldn't keep up.
So, to ration those scarce college places,
South Korea rekindled its
ancient tradition:
introducing a mandatory college
entrance exam.
Only this one focused on modern
subjects and was genuinely open to all.
Well, with their children's futures riding
so heavily on that single test,
Korean parents were keen to provide
the best preparation they could.
And since they lacked confidence in
the public school system,
families started looking for alternatives.
This was similar to the situation in
19th century America,
where most parents opted for
private schooling.
But here in Korea there was a twist:
the private schools were so heavily
regulated that they didn't really look
much different from the public schools.
So, parents decided to opt outside
the regular school sector entirely,
hiring private tutoring services
called "hagwons."
These hagwons were popular
with parents,
but they weren't popular with everyone;
government officials in charge of
public schooling worried that they
would lead to inequality in the
education system.
And so, in 1980,
they outlawed most private tutoring.
This prohibition on after-school
tutoring was every bit as effective as
America's prohibition on alcohol.
Instead of driving hagwons
out of business,
the ban drove them underground.
They became illegal
educational speakeasies,
like the illicit drinking
establishments of the "Roaring 20s."
The Korean government even offered cash
rewards to anyone ratting-out teachers
engaged in extra-curricular...curricula.
Despite all this,
the private tutoring industry boomed.
By the time the ban was struck down
20 years later,
the number of hagwons had risen
from 5,000 to more than 67,000.
With the outright ban on
hagwons overturned,
the government resorted to a
cap on fees.
But this, too, was ruled unconstitutional.
Not to be dissuaded,
the government set a 10pm curfew on
hagwon lessons that remains in
place to this day.
"In place," but not entirely effective...
Actually, my tuition,
my hagwon at that time,
we had a time limitation on only
ten o'clock.
But, they had a program from
10 to 1 o'clock.
So, what they did...we were studying
at 10 o'clock and,
we were in the night,
we had to finish the lesson.
And then,
they send us all into the
restaurant just down below.
And then, when the police comes,
right - you know - they will check
around whether this hagwon is
ongoing or not.
After they went back to their
police station,
they call us to the restaurant,
"Okay, now you can come up."
Then we come up again and we
had a lesson.
And sometime we were studying but - by
the window we see a policeman.
Then, we turn off the lights.
Then we wait for they to
cross the road.
Then, we turn on again and study.
It is illegal.
However, parents want it.
Do they ever.
Ninety-five percent of students have
taken hagwon lessons by the time they
leave high school.
It's typical to attend after school,
several days a week -
sometimes well past midnight.
And, according to one study,
three-quarters of students prefer
those hagwon lessons to their
regular school classes.
Actually, I think the aim of hagwon is
helping us to get better grades
from the school.
And for me, actually,
hagwon help me a lot.
I've seen many students asleep
at school like, all subjects,
from morning - eight to afternoon -
five pm...and they just sleep.
And then, when they go to hagwon,
their eyes are so sparkly,
and they're ready to study,
and they study 'til two o'clock.
Of course it's that way;
it's because hagwons are
customer-oriented.
When students enroll in hagwons,
they are matched with classes based on
their performance level.
So it's possible to tailor the lessons
to those specific students.
But that's not the case for regular
public schools.
Which means the highly-advanced
students and those who are far behind
are in the same classes,
classes that aren't really suited to them.
Public schools are divided by
age in classes.
I think that makes a big difference.
And it's not the only difference.
Schools are places students are
required to attend,
but they choose to come to hagwons so
they have more affection toward them.
That means they tend to pay closer
attention in class and,
because of that,
it is so fun to teach these kids.
Mr. Choi is a national star.
A lot of students have fallen in love
with his lectures.
In the past,
students from outside Seoul had to
come take these classes during vacation.
But as internet technology improved,
kids got the opportunity to listen to
great lectures in the comfort of
their own homes.
Actually, I'm not from Seoul;
I'm from Daejeon...which...there
aren't really many celebrity teachers,
so we have to take online courses.
So me and my friends - and we'd be all
watching the same teacher's education.
I actually met one of them at Seoul
train station - and me and my friends
from back home are, like,
excited and we want to take pictures.
He was like a celebrity to us and he
actually helped me with the subjects I
did not really do well on.
I teach around a thousand students
a year in person.
As for online - it's around ten or
fifteen thousand students a year.
Every online lecture has a
demonstration lecture.
Almost all students should see that
first and then,
they are free to choose.
Online and in-person lectures,
on average over 100,000 students
taking my lessons.
It is a market, it is an entire market.
And the consumer, a student,
likes the product that is better
than any others.
So teachers compete within the market
to become, like,
entertaining and educative at the
same time, you know?
I must study hard -
even harder than my students -
so the lecture is very enlivened,
and interesting, and exciting.
For online hagwon teachers,
if they deliver passionate lectures
and give good service,
many students will subscribe
to their classes...
and their earnings reflect that.
For the last ten years,
my whole lecture revenue is over 100
million dollars,
and my share is 25 million dollars.
But, at this point,
the regular schools' teachers,
if they worked harder,
there would be nothing.
There could be nothing for their
more efforts.
Not just in Korea but also in America,
there's nothing like that motivational
compensation system.
The best thing about teaching at
hagwons is the freedom it guarantees
about everything...as long as I'm
doing a good job.
But at hagwons,
you must renew your contract
every year.
If the feedback and surveys from
students are not good,
you could be let go.
It's a sort of carrot-and-stick approach:
you could be let go,
or you could be paid more.
So hagwon teachers have no choice but
to develop themselves in the best ways
they can.
There is a book called Professor
Farnsworth's Explanations in Biology.
It left a lasting impression on me.
In that book,
he says that everybody has a natural
instinct to share what they know.
To be able to share the things that
you know and get paid for doing that
is actually a miracle.
The same freedoms and incentives that
are driving the success of hagwons
have also created what people call the
"Miracle of the Han River," Korea's
rise in barely two generations from
war-torn ruins to, well...this.
During the 1960s,
average income per-person was less than
$500 in both North and South Korea.
But by the early 70s,
the nations began to diverge:
the South adopted an
open market economy; the North,
a centrally-planned government system.
Today, per-capita income is
twenty-times higher in the South.
It's not hard to spot the
difference...even from space.
The two Koreas at night: the North,
a sea of darkness,
the South awash with light.
South Korea's new wealth has spawned a
proliferation of colleges.
This view of Seoul is from the top of
the Classic 500 Building - which
itself was built by a university foundation.
But, though there are now enough
college places for everyone,
the high-stakes university
entrance exam remains,
and the competition to score well and
attend a top-ranked college is fierce.
It's fair to say that Korea's
combination of hiring practices,
high-stakes exams,
and intense education culture have
combined to make life pretty
tough for students.
In my case,
I stay up all night before exams,
maybe during six weeks.
So I got under pressure a lot.
Traditionally in Korea,
the educational level of a person has
played a crucial role in determining
his or her status in society.
Actually, I find this deeply troubling.
I feel that the kids are suffering in
this system created that is by adults.
And yet other students seem to take
the academic pressure in stride.
If I look back, I think,
it was not all just study.
You know, I had fun
with my friends, studying.
And I kind of enjoyed it.
And I wanted to do more to you know,
succeed and do better.
And I liked learning.
So, I think, not all Koreans are, like...
I don't want everyone to pity the Korean
students because we study a lot.
Sometimes we kind of enjoy it,
because we are doing it for ourselves.
And it's hard to undo a
thousand-year tradition.
But there are signs of change.
For one, businesses are finally starting to
look beyond elite college degrees when
sifting through their applicants' resumes.
Korea's challenge is to find a way of
easing the pressure on its students
while building on the key strength of
its hagwon sector: the ability to
bring top teachers within reach of a
massive audience.
Our challenge is to figure out
how they do it.
Could it have something to do with the
freedoms and incentives of
Korea's tutoring sector?
Its teachers have tremendous autonomy
and they're constantly striving to
improve their services to stay ahead
of the competition.
And the more students they serve,
the more money they bring in.
All of that's also true of private
schools back here in the United States.
So, if that's the recipe for
replicating excellence,
we'd expect to see the same kind of
growth among U.S. private schools.
Do we?
Let's find out.
On the next episode of School Inc.,
Andrew Coulson's journey takes him to
one of the top ten performing private
high schools in America,
to find out why replicating their
reputation of excellence is not part
of their highly successful traditions.
In Austin, Texas,
he visits a remarkable charter school
system where "scaling-up" and
"expansion" has become a source of
community pride.
And Coulson visits Chile to ask:
What could winemaking and education
possibly have in common?
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