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.Sometimes they showedthemselves to have the most ganas when their learning light finally switched on.1Escalante s math classes grew gradually during his early days atGarfield, but the arrival of Gradillas brought a more disciplined schoolenvironment and unconditional support for the challenging math pro-gram.In the 1981 82 school year, Escalante had 18 students in hiscalculus class.In May, all 18 students passed the AP calculus exam,an astounding number for any but the wealthiest high schools in thecountry.Then, as documented in the movie Stand and Deliver, 14 ofthose students were accused of cheating and their passing grades werewithdrawn.Twelve students retook the exam and all of them passedagain, with five earning top scores.The reputation of these students spread and math classes becameincreasingly popular.In 1987, 129 Garfield students took the AP cal-culus exam, a number exceeded by only four other schools in thecountry.Garfield accounted for over 25% of all Hispanics in the coun-try who passed the AP calculus test that year.Meanwhile, other APclasses flourished.Against all odds, Garfield High School sent an as-tonishingly large percentage of its graduates on to college and distin-guished careers.This story has an epilogue.Gradillas left Garfield in 1987, and sup-port for the math program weakened.Three years later, Escalante alsoleft in frustration, followed a year later by other key teachers in themath program.Although the math program at Garfield suffered, stu-dent achievement at the school remained high in the decades that1.Jaime Escalante and Jack Dirmann, The Jaime Escalante Math Program, Journalof Negro Education 59, no.3 (Summer 1990): 407 23. 42 THE LEAN MINDSETfollowed.Other schools in poor areas throughout the country have cop-ied the ideas of Gradillas and Escalante, offering challenging classes forstudents with the ganas to strive to reach their full potential.Anna: It sounds to me like the school had a pretty lousysystem for recognizing talented students.M&T: If talent is something that you discover, rather thansomething that you develop, this would be true.But re-search has shown that talent is not something people are born with;it is something that is developed over time with hard work anddiligent practice.Unfortunately, many schools create self-fulfillingprophecies by grouping children according to their perceived poten-tial.Once students are tracked as low-potential, they will not beassigned challenging classes, as Gradillas discovered.Tracking canstart very early and be based on little more than a student s com-mand of English.Otto: So where does IQ fit into this?M&T: Good question.IQ scores can also be a self-fulfilling prophecy.Carol Dweck whose work we willlook at next showed that when junior high studentsbelieve their intelligence cannot be changed, it doesn t change.When they believe or are taught that intelligence can be improvedthrough hard work, their math scores rise.2Ganas and the Growth MindsetYou might be wondering what Garfield High School in the 1980s has todo with business some decades later.To answer this question, consider ayoung child who wants to play the piano because she has heard some-one else play it beautifully.She sits down at the keyboard and hits thekeys and it doesn t sound very good.What happens next will determinewhether or not she learns to play the piano.Either she thinks, I m nogood at this; I ll go find something else to do that I am good at. Or shegets the message that no one starts out as a great musician; everyonehas to practice for a long time to become as good as the person whoinspired her.If she starts out with this growth mindset, she has a goodchance of becoming a musician.2.Lisa Blackwell, Kali Trzesniewski, and Carol Dweck, Implicit Theories of Intel-ligence Predict Achievement across an Adolescent Transition: A Longitudinal Studyand an Intervention, Child Development 78, no.1 (January February 2007): 246 63. CHAPTER 2 ENERGIZED WORKERS 43In her book Mindset,3 Carol Dweck suggests that when peopleapproach a task, they bring one of two mindsets.There arethose who expect to be good at whatever they attempt fromthe outset
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