Jack Macfarland vs Jaime Escalante

Mr. Marcfarland from "I Just Wanna be Average" and Mr. Escalante from Stand and Deliver are similar in many ways, but there is also a key difference between them. Both of them decided they want to teach seemingly on a whim, despite apparent success in their chosen career fields. And once they began teaching, both were successful, using similar methods, at motivating their students to learn. The most significance between the two, however, is in the students themselves. Mike Rose may have started high school in a vocational education program, but by the time he was enrolled in Macfarland's class, he was at the opposite end of the spectrum - a college preparation program. And he wasn't even new to it - Macfarland was his senior year English teacher, and Rose began his junior year in the college prep program. And the rest of the class was almost certainly a part of the college prep program for all of high school - Mike rose himself says "...I begin my junior year in the College Prep program. According to all I've read since, such a shift, as one report put it, is virtually impossible. Kids at that level rarely cross tracks." So, Mr. Macfarland was able to motivate a class full of college bound students to participate and succeed in class. Not nearly as impressive when put like that.
Mr. Escalante, on the other hand, had a class full of students who were prone to drop out of school entirely. None of them had any plans to go on to on to any college, or any kind of education at all post high school, and most probably weren't even going to finish high school. And despite having students like that, he was able to motivate them to excel in his class, starting with basic algebra and going all the way to teaching them calculus. He convinced a class of the worst students in the school to attend his class daily over the summer - not because they needed to be at summer school to graduate, but because they wanted to learn calculus. That is so much more impressive than anything that could be accomplished in a college preparatory English class. Mr. Macfarland and Mr. Escalante may have had similar teaching styles, similar backgrounds, and may have been met with similar success in their classes, but the vast differences in the kinds of students they taught is a significant difference between the two teachers.