Telling the story of this remarkable program, Robert Moses draws on lessons from the 1960s Southern voter registration he famously helped organize:

Everyone said sharecroppers didn’t want to vote. It wasn’t until we got them demanding to vote that we got attention. Today, when kids are falling wholesale through the cracks, people say they don’t want to learn. We have to get the kids themselves to demand what everyone says they don’t want.

We see the Algebra Project organizing community by community. Older kids serve as coaches for younger students and build a self-sustained tradition of leadership. Teachers use innovative techniques. And we see the success stories of schools like the predominately low-income Hart School in Bessemer, Alabama, which outscored the city’s middle-class flagship school in just three years. [Publisher’s description.]

ISBN: 9780807031278 | Beacon Press

The post Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

The post Teaching Economics As If People Mattered appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

In this new expanded and updated edition of Rethinking Mathematics, more than 50 articles show how to weave social justice issues throughout the mathematics curriculum, as well as how to integrate mathematics into other curricular areas.

Rethinking Mathematics offers teaching ideas, lesson plans, and reflections by practitioners and mathematics educators. This is real-world math — math that helps students analyze social problems as they gain essential academic skills.

This book offers hope and guidance for teachers to enliven and strengthen their math teaching. It will deepen students’ understanding of society and help prepare them to be critical, active participants in a democracy. Blending theory and practice, this is the only resource of its kind.

ISBN: 9780942961553 | Rethinking Schools | Table of Contents | Introduction

Reviews

“Who would have thought that math could be taught through such compelling social issues as racial profiling, the war in Iraq, and environmental racism? This superb book is an extraordinary collection of ideas for any teacher who wants to bring passion, engagement, and social justice to the mathematics classroom.” —Lisa Delpit, Eminent Scholar and Executive Director of the Center for Urban Education & Innovation, Florida International University, Miami

“From the songs of Sweet Honey in the Rock we know that ‘We who believe in freedom cannot rest.’ Now from the pages of Rethinking Mathematics we know that ‘We who believe in freedom cannot rest’ until we ensure that the learning and teaching of mathematics sings of social justice. We should all learn its new songs.” —Bob Moses, President and Founder of the Algebra Project

The post Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Robert Moses at the training for Freedom Summer volunteers, 1964. Photo by Steve Schapiro.

Robert Parris Moses was born on January 23, 1935, in Harlem, New York. Despite his quiet demeanor, he became an important figure in the Civil Rights Movement, working with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

In 1961, Moses, then field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, became the head of the SNCC’s Mississippi Project. Moses organized voter registration drives, sit-ins, and Freedom Schools, which led to significant gains in voting rights for black Mississippians.

As an organizer, he was heavily influenced by Ella Baker, who believed civil rights movements should belong to the people not to the leaders. In order to put victory in the hands of citizens, she believed, organizers should stay in the background, developing trust in communities, helping people define what they want, and then guiding them to their goals.

Continue reading this bio, from Americans Who Tell the Truth, here.
Learn about Moses’ current work at the Algebra Project.

Portrait of Bob Moses by Robert Shetterly, Americans Who Tell the Truth.

“Well, I don’t think that the Democratic Party to this day has confronted the issue of bringing into its ranks the kind of people that were represented by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. That is the real underclass of this country. The Democratic Party primarily has organized around the middle class. And we were challenging them not only on racial grounds but we were challenging them on the existence of a whole group of people who are the underclass of this country, white and black, who are not represented. And they weren’t prepared to hear that; I don’t know if they heard.” —Bob Moses, quote on portrait

The post Moses, Robert “Bob” Parris appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Image: Michael Duffy.

Media depictions of San Francisco show idyllic images of fog pouring under the Golden Gate Bridge or happy tourists riding cable cars, but rarely the mostly nonwhite neighborhoods of the east side.

San Francisco public schools have a bad track record of mimicking this masquerade, with very low numbers of African American and Latina/o students making it to senior year, and less than a quarter of those who do, graduating with the credits to move on to college. Our high school, the June Jordan School for Equity (JJSE), is located on the east side of the city, and was started by a group of teachers and parents who were disturbed by the high numbers of black and brown youth being underserved and then dropping out. Our commitment to send students of color to college means that they need a strong math education.

No one took making explicit social justice connections more seriously than Adam Renner, who started as a 9th-grade math teacher at JJSE in fall 2010 after many years as a teacher educator at the university level. In one of his first major projects, he had his students use math skills as a way to dig into a deeper understanding of the chasmic divide between rich and poor in our city. He wanted to shed light on the impact of economics and the structures of racism on education, housing, and job opportunities.

For other articles on the link between math and social justice, see Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers.

The post Plotting Inequalities, Building Resistance: High School Students Use Math to Reflect on Social Inequality appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

The teaching activity and article previewed here is available in full, for free, at RethinkingSchools.org.

By Flannery Denny

“Before you go, I have to show you some really cool graphs!” Judy exclaimed.

It was summer vacation and I was visiting friends in Ithaca, New York. I wasn’t really in the mood to wear my math teacher hat, but Judy pulled me toward her computer and opened the user interface to her solar panels. I was unexpectedly captivated by how much personality the graphs had — every day was different!

Besides the daily power yield views, which reveal sunrise, sunset, capacity, and the passing of each cloud, Judy could follow monthly patterns and see how solar production compared to the predictions upon which her array had been selected. She shared a link with me so that I could take screenshots to make materials for my 7th-grade classroom lesson.

As I distributed the materials to my students a few months later, I told them the story of Judy’s solar panels on upstate New York’s first community-based multi-customer solar farm. Remote net metering allows people to invest in grid-connected solar panels (or other renewables) on another piece of property and offset their own energy consumption with those panels. One benefit of the program is that it allows people whose property does not have good sun exposure to find a property that does. Individuals anywhere have the option of installing solar panels “off-the-grid,” but to have solar panels that contribute energy to the grid when they’re producing more than you need, and to be able to use energy from the grid when your solar panels are not producing enough energy to meet your needs, the government has to allow net metering.

That happened in New York when a broad coalition came together to figure out the logistics and advocate for change. Net metering laws in New York were expanded in 2011 and then in 2015 the New York Public Service Commission issued an order on shared renewables that made it possible to implement projects like the one Judy was part of. Identifying ideal properties and connecting landowners with the local utility and solar installers was the next step. Local energy activists (including Judy) did a lot of legwork to make that happen. By 2016, their community solar farm in Ithaca was producing energy for 63 households. . . Continue reading at Rethinking Schools.

This teaching activity is in the Summer 2019 issue of Rethinking Schools. Subscribe to the Rethinking Schools magazine today.

The post Solar Power Comes to Math Class appeared first on Zinn Education Project.