Commencement Daniel Adler

Economics, geometry and government teacher
Long Beach Polytechnic High School, Long Beach, California

With close to 5,000 students, Long Beach Polytechnic High School is among the nation’s largest public schools.“At a school so big,”writes graduating Amherst senior Jamie Gracie,“it’s very easy to find teachers who teach directly to the test.” Daniel Adler, however, stood out as someone who, as Gracie writes, was working “to make a difference in his students’ lives and in the greater community around him.” Through extracurricular activities and competitions, Adler gave students real-world applications for their learning in geometry and economics. All the while, he worked to serve a broad cross-section of student needs. Knowing many students would be unable to afford formal SAT prep courses, Adler completed the required curriculum early in order to teach his own SAT math prep. Gracie also recalls Adler writing two versions of the same test to keep advanced students engaged, and she credits him with inspiring her passion for economics (which became one of her majors at Amherst) and for learning more broadly. He also helped students to found the Volun- teer Income Tax Program at Poly, which provides free tax preparation to neighbors in need. Adler, Gracie says,“truly embodies the Amherst ideology of equality of opportunity in education.”