Citing the Algebra Project in honor of Black History Month

With Black History Month coming to a close, I wanted to bring your attention to the Algebra Project, a national mathematics literacy effort for low income and minority students. Robert Moses, the creator of the Project, was very active in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. He brings the same passion to his crusade for the improvement of math education for the reason that both movements involve minorities seeking better conditions. A strong math education, he believes, can lead to economic success for minority students and students facing poverty. The Website cites a National Assessment of Education Progress study noting that 43% of black 12th graders test at a “below basic” level. In a recent NPR podcast, Moses explained the Algebra Project as an “effort to use math literacy as an organizing tool to use economic and educational rights.” He continues, “In our society, algebra is the place where we ask students to master a quantitative literacy requirement.”

The Algebra Project prides itself on a grassroots approach in order to ensure a quality education for all students, regardless of race or social status. Its efforts include a revolutionary program, known as Transition Curriculum. This program helps the students’ transition from middle-school arithmetic to high-school algebra. The curriculum helps students grasp important mathematical concepts using five steps that begins with familiar concrete experiences and progresses to abstract mathematics:

• participate in a physical event;
• create a drawing or model of the event;
• discuss and write about the event in “intuitive language”;
• discuss and write about the event in “structured language”; and
• develop symbolic representations for the key features of the event, make presentations to classmates, and apply these representations.

So much emphasis is put on reading at grade level, and deservingly so, but the same fervor should be encouraged in math education. Students can’t be expected to gain admittance into a top university without performing well on the math portion of the SATs or ACTs. Virtually all upper-level career positions require some sort of knowledge in math and problem solving skills.