Outside Looking In is an occasional...

Outside Looking In is an occasional column on how Central Los Angeles is portrayed by news media outside the area.

The Washington Post recently examined how the mathematics program at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles has fared since renowned teacher Jaime Escalante left the school three years ago. The story reported that this year, the 20th anniversary of Escalante’s arrival at the school, “a large group of teachers and students mostly unfamiliar with him seem to be doing well on their own, a sign that Escalante may have done more for Garfield and for American education than even his own considerable ego thought possible.”

The story noted that there were internal differences over how to continue Escalante’s work and that the number of students who took Advanced Placement calculus tests dropped from 131 in 1992 to 86 last year. Teachers and students blamed the drop on the school’s year-round, three-track schedule.

However, the Post reported, the number now appears to be holding steady.

“If Garfield’s program continues to prosper without him, it will significantly boost the notion that demanding high-level work from previously ill- prepared students can work anywhere,” the article reported.

But Escalante, in his third year at Hiram Johnson High School in Sacramento, “remains skeptical that Garfield can keep its program at a high level without him,” the Post reported.

“I have a big question mark,” Escalante said in an interview with the Post. “You have to retain the good teachers to do the job.”

*

In a story headlined “Brooklyn Expatriates in Los Angeles Mourn Fading Reminders of the Past,” the New York Times on April 3 used the renaming of Brooklyn Avenue to Cesar E. Chavez Avenue to explore changes in East Los Angeles and how the city’s links to New York are “inexorably weakening.”

The Times noted the rising political influence of the city’s Latino community:

“Ten years ago, Hispanics were unrepresented on both the Los Angeles City Council and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Now, they have proved numerous and powerful enough to rename one of the city’s most historic streets.”

The story continued: “But a majority of the 1,500 people who signed petitions opposed to the change were Hispanic. Either they felt their own attachment to Brooklyn Avenue, or believed Mr. Chavez, who had few ties to the neighborhood, would more appropriately be honored elsewhere. ‘Brooklyn Bridge made New York famous and Brooklyn Avenue made East Los Angeles famous,’ said Julia Ramirez, whose family owns a local mortuary here. ‘When they baptize you, they give you a name and you hold on to it and like it. We are not farm workers here.’ ”