When asked about education, Duncan Hunter talked about Jaime Escalante, the East Los Angeles math teacher who, during the 1980s, had remarkable success teaching poor children AP calculus. Escalante was the subject of the 1988 movie “Stand and Deliver.” Congressman, where have you been these last two decades? You know, there’s newer evidence of success in our schools.

In any case, Hunter said Escalante was driven out of teaching “by the unions.” My quick Wikipedia fact-check shows that’s not true: Escalante did switch high schools in 1991 due to disagreements with the administration over class size. But he retired in 2001 not because of unions, but to return to his native country of Bolivia.

—Dana Goldstein

Dana Goldstein, a former associate editor and writer at the Prospect, comes from a family of public-school educators. She received the Spencer Fellowship in Education Journalism, a Schwarz Fellowship at the New America Foundation, and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellowship at the Nation Institute. Her journalism is regularly featured in Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications, and she is a staff writer at the Marshall Project.