Teacher Sees Math Project as Part of Civil Rights Work

Robert Moses, a civil rights pioneer, will never forget that Mississippi August morning in 1961.

He and two others showed up at the McComb County courthouse to register voters. Three white men stood in their way. Then, as Moses told an audience last week at Occidental College, in a flash he was knocked to the ground by blows to the forehead and temple.

He was struck repeatedly. His face was driven into the pavement. Blood flowed. Yet Moses remembers telling himself: “First surrender your body, then surrender your life, to the struggle. I surrender.” The beating stopped. “We walk up the steps to the courthouse.”

Moses was attacked as a leader of a movement to register African Americans to vote. Today, he spends five days a week in the midst of another struggle he has surrendered his life to--teaching math to poor, minority youths.

Andrew Young, who also loomed large in the civil rights era, has said that improving the quality of schooling for African Americans is a civil rights issue as important as the movement 30 years ago.

Moses, now 65, agrees, and he’s focused on math.

At a time when an entry level auto worker needs to know algebraic formulas and physics to properly wire electrical circuits, those who don’t learn math are shut out of the economic mainstream. It’s no longer enough to know how to read. You also must know how to solve for “x.”

So, since the early 1980s, Moses has applied his organizing skills toward algebra. A math teacher both before and after his civil rights activities, he became dissatisfied with the math instruction at the public school his daughter attended in Cambridge, Mass.

Adhering to the community organizing principle of “casting down your bucket where you are,” he got involved. What eventually came from that is the nationally known Algebra Project.

The project operates in about 25 cities, including Inglewood. The idea is to help poor, minority students in the sixth and seventh grades prepare for algebra in the eighth grade. The project uses innovative, hands-on teaching methods. But the greatest innovation, and the one that draws most heavily on Moses’ history as a community organizer, is that students who go through it are trained to then help younger counterparts.

The point is to create a cadre of math-proficient activists to counter the low expectations that many minority students face in school. If they show they can do the work, Moses preaches, they’ll be admitted to algebra, then geometry, then college, then well-paying jobs.

Nationally, 71% of low-income, minority students who take algebra and geometry go on to college; among low-income students who do not take those courses, only 27% seek higher education.

“When people at the bottom rise . . . everything that’s built on their backs is going to have to change,” Moses said. “That is hard but that is the struggle.”

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Changes in education policy, especially these days, are being driven by state legislatures and governors. Tests, accountability mechanisms, academic standards--all are being heaped on schools.

But Moses said true change won’t come until students, and their parents, make their own demands on the system. That won’t come, Moses said, until students make demands on themselves.

That’s the issue he confronts at Lanier High School in Jackson, Miss., where he’s now teaching six classes a day. He struggles, he admits, to create a culture of achievement in class. That culture--built on discipline, hard work and students’ willingness to have their work critiqued--is elusive.

The work is slow, but Moses is committed. He has students like Fareeda Figgers, Silver Holmes and Erika Smith--all 15--to show for it. All three came with Moses to Occidental, where he was receiving an honorary doctorate, to demonstrate the help they offer three times a week in after-school math workshops with middle school students.

They play games, it’s true. But the games teach lessons in factoring and other math skills. All three young women attended the same sessions when they were younger. They say they learned the purpose of math, the why’s as well as the how’s. Now, all are taking geometry. All three plan on college--Figgers to become a marine biologist and Holmes and Smith to become doctors.

In class, Figgers said, Moses is as serious about math as he was about the right to vote.

“He likes dedication,” she said. “He wants you to focus on what you’re doing until the bell rings. He doesn’t want you to give up and say, “ ‘I don’t understand. I don’t know why.’ ”