Jaime Escalante

As a teacher in the under-performing Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, Jaime Escalante taught calculus to Mexican-American students who went on to perform shockingly well on their Advanced Placement exams; so well that the College Board accused them of cheating in 1982. His fight against these accusations, which he considered racial profiling, was the subject of the inspirational 1998 film Stand and Deliver. Escalante also worked to add 16 AP courses and saw the school's dropout rate plummet from 55 percent in 1978, to just 14 percent by 1988. Updated 2009