Stand and Deliver

“Jaime Escalante believed a two-man parade would become a four-man parade and a four man-parade would become a hundred-man parade.” So says Tom Musca, co-writer and producer of “Stand and Deliver,” the 1988 film that made Garfield High School’s Escalante America’s most celebrated teacher.
Jaime Escalante lost his battle with cancer last week. His passing returned him briefly to the national spotlight, which is hardly compensation, but at least it’s something. His story – a Bolivian immigrant with a genius for teaching who transformed one of America’s worst schools into a success factory – is both inspiring and challenging.

Escalante proved public schools can succeed, and that cultural differences are not impenetrable barriers to success. Escalante proved if you want to shoot for the stars you have to aim high.
Escalante’s “burros” learned the principles of a successful life: work, pride and passion. Tragically, the Los Angeles Unified School District didn’t learn anything.

Undoubtedly, Jaime Escalante was a difficult man – a prima donna whose celebrity manufactured envy, jealousy and resentment. He wouldn’t compromise and clashed with the political zeitgeist of most of his peers.

Escalante was not a liberal but neither was he a conservative. He was an independent thinker, and bureaucracies are threatened by originality. So maybe it was inevitable Escalante would eventually leave Garfield.

What wasn’t inevitable was Garfield’s slide back into the abyss of academic failure.

By September 2008, the school that was once hailed internationally for producing mathematics scholars was subject to a takeover because of “persistent academic failure.” Unbelievably, only 5 percent of Garfield’s math students tested as “proficient.”

Jaime Escalante delivered Garfield a magnificent gift and the school threw it away.

Rather than institutionalizing the techniques perfected by Escalante, the LAUSD wrote off his success as an aberration, a cult of personality that had no application beyond a single gifted teacher. Rather than learn from Escalante, the bureaucracy waited him out. With Jaime not around to embarrass the LAUSD with his students’ success, Garfield High renewed its pact with failure.

On May 20, 2007 a freshman torched the school, incinerating the auditorium, resulting in $30 million in damage. With Escalante’s passing the LAUSD announced the new building will be named in his honor. But Jaime’s name on a plaque is the kind of safe tribute you’d expect – the kind of inside-the-box thinking Escalante abhorred.

The only legitimate honor for Jaime Escalante is Garfield’s phoenix-like rise from the ashes of failure to academic excellence. Anything less is pretending.

I recently lost my job, not that this isn’t a job, but it’s not the job that makes it possible for my family to eat and the DWP bill to get paid. Those water mains won’t fix themselves you know. So this is a big problem at my house because all of us have gotten into the habit of eating and most of us are into bathing, which means I’m going to have to find another job real soon. Suddenly everyone else’s recession has become my own personal depression.

“What happened?” I’ve been asked over and over. “I lost my job,” I find myself answering robotically.

But it’s not like I lost my keys. I know exactly where my job is; my employers have simply chosen someone else to do it.

“We’re taking the company in a new direction,” said the mean man who took the kibble out of my new kitten’s mouth. (Did I mention the wife and I just adopted a rescue kitten?) I was quick to point out to the boss my compass also has 360 degrees on it, so if he would just point me in the “new direction” the company was headed I’m sure I could go there, too.

That’s when he lowered the boom – he was going in the direction of a meeting I still had on my calendar and I was going in the direction of the unemployment line, which is a scary place to be anytime but semi-terrifying today.

Losing my gig is extra-frightening because while at times I may act like a kid, just ask the wife, I’m hardly a kid. But I’m not Larry King either, so I still have life left in me. Yet, I am old enough to remember the Beatles from “The Ed Sullivan Show” rather than a video game system and that makes me closer to retirement than an exciting new chapter in my professional life. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

I’ve written many times about the struggles of working people in Los Angeles. When I had that other job, I yakked countless hours about how difficult L.A. makes it for businesses to thrive or even survive. But getting the ax takes all the headlines and all the government reports and all the studies and morphs them into one gigantic knot in the pit of your stomach.

Losing a job is like a death in the family, a beloved relative if you loved what you did; but even if you hated your job, losing it is like losing a distant rich relative who sent you a check at the holidays.

Losing your job is a profound event. There is a grieving process and then, hopefully, healing and recovery. The irony of my situation is not lost on me. I may be the one of the few people in Los Angeles whose career was helped by our crummy city government. Antonio Villaraigosa was my own personal stimulus package.

Millions of Americans have lost their jobs in the past year. We’re now told it’s a good thing when the economy only sheds another 250,000 jobs. That’s a sign the recession is slowing. Really? Or is it a sign we’re running out of people to fire?

Candidates for office great and small preach the gospel of the workingman. Retraining is the stock response when pressed for an answer to lost jobs. But politicians fall silent when you ask, retrained for what? What exactly is a 47-year-old sheet metal worker with a wife and two kids supposed to be retrained for?

Nobody asked me, but I always resented the politicians and corporate titans who decided there were jobs America was better off without and justified their actions by saying there were jobs Americans would not do.

Americans are not lazy people, but sometime we are gullible people. Many of us, myself included, had been lulled into a false sense of security – as if the life we had been leading is the life we are entitled to forever. Obviously, life offers no such guarantee, unless you’re Ryan Seacrest.

Ideally, we find much more in work than just a paycheck: a sense of self, a purpose, hopefully a greater social good. And the paycheck part is good, too. But it’s the whole package that makes the loss of a job such a humbling experience. I accept my job loss in that spirit since I could probably use humility more than most.

BOY, did I catch holy hell for last week’s column. I wrote about our perverse proclivity to reward bad behavior. It was mostly about David Letterman, but I made a reference to Cardinal Roger Mahony and his six years of stonewalling the investigation into the sexual abuse of children by pedophile priests, specifically Father Michael Baker. However, I spelled the cardinal’s name wrong. An error of this magnitude must be set right.

“It doesn’t matter what they say as long as they spell your name right,” goes the old showbiz clich . That must also be true in the religion biz, because I got an inbox-full from Tod Tamberg, director of media relations for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

“Perhaps you could nuzzle up to a copy editor next time you take a whack at Cardinal Mahony. Then maybe at least you’ll spell his name correctly,” wrote Tamberg from his official Archdiocese e-mail account.

Apparently, last week I inserted an “e” where it didn’t belong, spelling “Mahony” as “Mahoney.” Tamberg called my spelling error “bush league,” which makes me wonder what adjective describes his profession? “Apologist?” “Enabler?” “Un-indicted co-conspirator?”

But wrong is wrong, so allow me to clean up this mess: It was Cardinal Roger “no e” Mahony who spent more than half-a-billion dollars papering over the sexual abuse of children. Clearly Tamberg wants the cardinal to get full credit for this achievement. If my interloping “e” caused Mahony any discomfort,

I pray for his forgiveness.

And how about a tip of the cap to Tamberg? Say what you will, the guy has his boss’s back. Six years of spinning and smearing the victims and he still has time to check my spelling.

But “e” or “no e,” Mahony’s house of lies is crumbling. We now know Monsignor Richard Loomis, former vicar of clergy, part of Mahony’s inner circle, in a sworn deposition claims he sent the cardinal a memo warning of Baker’s continued sexual assaults against children and testified that Mahony barred him from calling the cops. These aren’t the words of a bush league newspaper pundit. Loomis is a priest, one of Mahony’s own. The stonewall has cracked.

For six years the cardinal has successfully avoided putting his hand on a Bible in open court. So what if Daniel Murphy High School had to close and be auctioned off along with hundreds of millions in other church property? The important thing was to preserve Mahony’s bully pulpit – accent on the “bully.”

Lawyered up, with P.R. firms and a code of silence the CIA would envy, Roger “no e” Mahony continues to lead the largest congregation of Catholics in America – long after Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law fled the country in shame. But Mahony has no shame; he has Tod Tamberg, his own personal spellcheck.

Fortunately, none of this has anything to do with Catholicism itself. The Catholic faith is an agent for goodness and personal grace. I was an altar boy and a graduate of Catholic schools, kindergarten through college.

I’ve seen great works by thousands of good people in parishes from coast to coast. Sadly, Catholic bashers seize upon the Mahonys and Tambergs of the world and use their mendacity as an excuse to belittle a great faith. Catholicism is not suffering a crisis of faith, rather a crisis of fallible flesh-and-blood humans who hide behind canon law to escape the penalties of civil law.

In prison pedophiles are shunned, yet in L.A. politicians still queue up to have their photo taken with Mahony. I’ve often wondered who are those dopes who mugged for the camera with O.J. Simpson on the golf course? I also wonder how craven or cynical are politicians and parishioners who seek Mahony’s blessing rather than his resignation.

We claim to take crimes against children seriously. At best, we’re erratic. Roman Polanski may finally be dragged back to L.A. after 30 years in exile to face the same prosecutor Mahony has dodged for more than half a decade. Polanski has his defenders; the cardinal has Tod Tamberg, a man who is paid to defend the indefensible.

For my part, I have a dream: When the arrest warrant is finally served on the cardinal, his name will be spelled correctly.