Meeting - February 3, 2022

Rafe Esquith, a 1981 graduate of UCLA, is a teacher who taught at Hobart Boulevard Elementary School from 1984 until his resignation in 2015. Many of his students, who were all from a community of poor and immigrant families, started class very early, left late, and typically achieved high scores in standardized tests. Esquith has authored books about teaching and his annual class Shakespeare productions were featured in the 2005 documentary The Hobart Shakespeareans. His teaching honors include the 1992 Teacher of the Year, for The Walt Disney Company's American Teacher Awards, a Fellowship from Johns Hopkins University, Oprah Winfrey's $100,000 "Use Your Life Award," Parents Magazine's "As You Grow Award," National Medal of Arts, and Esquith was made an honorary Member of the Order of the British Empire. He gave a TED talk about this subject in 2012.