Stand and do

A new computer science teacher, Jaime Escalante, comes to Garfield High School, located in one of Los Angeles ’s poorest neighborhoods. For lack of computers, he has to start teaching mathematics. In the class that was entrusted to him, disrespect and a complete lack of discipline reign, the students are mainly from poor families. Despite all this, the protagonist begins to teach, using a variety of methods with humor. Unusual for the class, they nonetheless help Jaime to gain sympathy from the students and arouse their interest in mathematics. At one of the teacher’s meetings, he learns that in the next academic year the school is threatened with closure for low rates at the final exams, and says that he is ready to help in solving this problem. Jaime helps books to one of the students, Angel Guzman, who is afraid of contempt from relatives and friends, and dissuades the parents of one of the girls, from whom he noticed good abilities, to take her out of school.

Over time, Jaime understands that his students have much greater potential, and at the end of the year at the school council, he announces that he wants to teach children advanced mathematics in the future, as this will allow them to pass the test of increased complexity, increasing their chances of entering. This is met with resistance from the rest of the teachers, headed by Raquel Ortega, who do not believe in the possibility of students and the success of the case. Their main counterargument is the fact that children are not even familiar with trigonometry and mathematical analysis . The protagonist presents his radical plan - trigonometry and matanalysis, he decides to teach children on summer days, including Saturday, while their other peers will have a vacation. At the beginning of the new school year, he gives the class a choice - for those who want to continue to prepare for the test of increased complexity, it is necessary to sign a contract according to which the number of training hours allocated per day for studying mathematics increases sharply. Everyone signs it. Preparation begins, Jaime gives her almost all of her free time, and one day he has a heart attack. Not wanting to lie in the hospital and follow the doctors' recommendations to stay away from work, he returns to school and continues to prepare children.

And here comes the time for passing the test. Soon after writing it, students learn that they all passed it on, and that no school in Southern California can boast so many students who passed it. However, it is precisely because of these results and the same errors that the test results are called into question by the Educational Testing Service. This leads to conflicts both among the students themselves and between Jaime himself and the representatives of the commission. The protagonist accuses the latter in the face that the reason for everything lies not in the test results, but in the ethnicity and poverty of the students. In response, the class is offered to pass the test again, this time under the supervision of representatives of the commission. In the director’s office, Jaime learns that all 18 students retook the math test of increased complexity and requires restoring the original results.

Captions at the end of the film indicate that in the future the number of students in this school who passed this test grew from year to year.

• Stand and Do ( Internet ) at Internet Movie Database  
• Survive and do (English) on allmovie  
• Stand and Do ( Rotten Tomatoes)