Bob Moses believes math literacy is a civil rights issue
By Christina Fleming
Before Whitney Brakefield entered Lanier High School in Jackson, Miss., in 2002, her math scores were at the bottom of her class. "I didn’t like math," she said. But today Brakefield is majoring in industrial and systems engineering at Mississippi State University. She credits her pursuit of higher education to the Algebra Project, a math literacy program started in her high school by civil rights activist Bob Moses.
Moses brought Brakefield and other students and colleagues from the Algebra Project to the "Good Schools/Bad Schools?" conference on education reporting at Columbia Journalism School. Together, they told the story of how a very simple idea – teaching math to low-income students – could change lives.
The idea began with Moses, 75, a New York City native who was a leading figure in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. As part of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Moses endured beatings and imprisonment as he worked to register black voters in Mississippi. He went on to become a full-time educator with a degree from Harvard and a mission to establish math literacy as a civil rights issue because it creates a path to economic opportunity in the technology industry as well as other professions.
At the conference, Moses told his story by having important people in his life tell theirs. The presentation was a reminder that none of us achieve or discover our purpose by ourselves. One of the themes in his work is that change happens when people engage as a community. In the Algebra Project, students are raised to be future leaders in educational reform.
The first speaker was Gary Benenson, a math student whom Moses taught from 1958 to 1961 at the Horace Mann School, a private college preparatory school in the Bronx. Benenson, a professor of engineering at City College of New York, described how he now creates math, science and art curriculum for elementary school students in his spare time. Benenson’s project, City Technologies, incorporates activities like building toys to engage students. "I think of it as an elementary analog to the Algebra Project," said Benenson.
Other presenters included Moses' wife, Janet Jemmott Moses, who also worked with SNCC; the director of operations for the Algebra Project, Ben Moynihan; two former high school students from Mississippi, Brakefield and Sidney Carey; and two staff members, Lauren Veasey and Omo Moses, from the Young People’s Project, which hires college and high school students to tutor elementary and middle school students. Omo was a co-founder of the Young People’s project and is Moses' son.
The idea for the Algebra Project began when Bob Moses' oldest child, Maisha Moses, was beginning eighth grade. For years, Moses had been supplementing his children's math education with his own instruction, which meant that Maisha Moses was ready for algebra in eighth grade. But her school didn't offer it, so Moses began teaching it to her and three others as a parent volunteer. "And right away then I looked at what was the race and class, who was doing what kind of math," Moses said.
The Algebra Project teaches through experiential learning. In his book "Radical Equations," Moses cites the importance of starting a lesson with an event like a subway field trip. The subway line functions like a number line so students start to visualize how adding or subtracting the stops could equal positive or negative numbers. Or a teacher could start a lesson by having a student say which student is taller to introduce the concepts of "greater than" or "less than." Students then draw and name the event in their own language before learning the mathematical symbols and using what they learned on other problems. Students also teach their peers after they have understood a concept.
Ben Moynihan, the director of operations at the Algebra Project, pointed out that most students are taught mathematical concepts without practical applications. But he said that only 11 percent of students are able to learn from abstract concepts.
Academics talk about "closing the achievement gap" between kids of different socio-economic and racial backgrounds. But Moses prefers the phrase "raising the floor." He says he wants to shape curriculum so that the children who enter high school at the lowest math level will also be educated to attend college and pursue math even further. "Right now what happens with the kids at the bottom is that they are remediated," Moses said. "Or they are forgotten."
Since 1982, the Algebra Project has worked with tens of thousands of students in hundreds of schools. It has received funding from the Open Society Institute, Tides Foundation, as well as family foundations and individual donors. Currently, the Algebra Project has a five-year, $4 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation to develop curriculum for students who enter high school with math scores in the bottom quarter of their peers. The Algebra Project partners with research mathematicians at universities and five high schools across the country. These schools were chosen because of their geographic and ethnic diversity and are situated in rural and urban America.
Whitney Brakefield was a part of the first group of students to take part in this research at Lanier High School. But Brakefield's involvement with the Algebra Project didn't end for her when she graduated. She and hundreds of high school and college students are hired to tutor middle school and elementary students in math through the Young People's Project, the non-profit that grew out of the Algebra Project. It operates in 16 cities and provides 3,000 elementary and middle school students in low-income or minority communities with after school programs. The goal is to give students leadership and organizing skills so that they can become education reform advocates.
"When I think about it," Brakefield told the audience at the conference, "I also think about the old saying the fish is the last one to recognize the ocean. The Algebra Project took me out of the struggle I was in." Doing better in just one subject changed the way she saw herself. "Once you start believing, then you start knowing," she said. "Once you start knowing better, you start doing better."