Rafe Esquith
American writer
Rafe Esquith is an American teacher who taught at Hobart Boulevard Elementary School, in Los Angeles, California, from 1984 until his resignation in 2015 as a settlement with the LAUSD. Many of his students, who were all from a community of poor and immigrant families, were described to start classes very early, leave the school late, and typically achieve high scores in standardized tests. Esquith has authored books about teaching and conducted his annual class Shakespeare productions, which were featured in the 2005 documentary The Hobart Shakespeareans.
His teaching honors include the 1992 Teacher of the Year Award (given by 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", and National Medal of Arts. Also, he was made an honorary Member of the Order of the British Empire.
Life and career
After graduating from UCLA in 1981, Esquith began teaching in 1982 at Ivanhoe Elementary School. Two years later, he moved to Hobart, the second-largest elementary school in the United States. Most of the students in the school came from Central American and Korean families. According to a 2005 report on National Public Radio, 90 percent of his students were living below the poverty level, and all were from immigrant families, with none of them speaking English as a first language.
The dynamic agenda and intensive curriculum that Esquith had previously applied at Ivanhoe proved to be challenging for his pupils at Hobart. Thus, he was resolved to prove that the students of Hobart were no less capable than those anywhere else, but rather their expectations had not been set high enough.
The public source identifies “Rafe Esquith” as american writer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Rafe, Esquith and American.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7282479. VIAF identifies the subject as 4297456. The Library of Congress control number is n2002103674. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1984, 2015, 2005 and 1992.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rafe Esquith” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.