“Stand and Deliver,” the 1988 film about the Los Angeles mathematics teacher Jaime Escalante, will be shown March 15 on most public-television stations.
The film will air during a fund-raising “pledge week,” and a number of stations will use the broadcast to help make viewers aware of the educational services they offer. For instance, Mr. Escalante and Edward James Olmos, who portrays him in the film, will appear in taped segments produced for the pledge breaks by KCET-tv in Los Angeles.
The National Education Association also has urged its members to help their local stations take phone calls from contributors on that date.
“Stand and Deliver” tells of Mr. Escalante’s success in teaching Advanced Placement calculus to mostly disadvantaged Hispanic students at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. Mr. Olmos has been nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal.
The nea, meanwhile, has become an underwriter for public television and public radio.
According to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the nation’s largest teachers’ union has already provided $200,000 for the fourth year of Project Literacy U.S. to WQED-tv in Pittsburgh. The station will use the grant for a documentary on literacy and mentoring.
The union also plans to become an underwriter for one year of National Public Radio’s news programming, which includes such programs as “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition.”
Four videotapes aimed at drug prevention will be broadcast in the coming months on The Learning Channel, a cable-television service.
And, in the largest government mailing of audiovisual materials to schools, the Education Department has sent more than 150,000 videocassettes of the programs to every school district in the nation.
The programs deal with the dangers of drugs and provide advice for students on dealing with peer pressure.
The Learning Channel broadcasts will include: “Straight at Ya” and “Speak Up, Speak Out: Learning to Say No to Drugs,” which will be shown twice in April; “Private Victories,” a series
of four 30-minute episodes, which will be shown at 11 A.M. est Tuesdays and 4 P.M. est Thursdays from now through
April; and “Downfall: Sports
and Drugs,” which will air
March 7 and 9 and April 20 and 25.
Cassettes and teacher guides are also available from the National Audiovisual Center, 8700 Edgewood Dr., Capitol Heights, Md. 20743, and the National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information, P.O. Box 2345, Rockville, Md. 20853.--mw
