In his book, Moses takes us on an Odyssey through the grassroots civil rights movement of the Deep South. He chronicles the efforts that ordinary folks in Mississippi took to attain the promised, "one man one vote." However, Moses’ book does more than chronicle events. It tells the story of communities transforming themselves to their own benefit. "What made it (the civil rights movement) radical was the work, the effort, at encouraging this group to empower itself." (p. 20) Moses explains that for Blacks to fight for enfranchisement, they had to see the connection between their vote and their survival. As an organizer, Moses believed that his job was to help Blacks to see that void of political power, whites could continue to run the lives of Blacks. The fact that whites could control Blacks socially through segregation, ruin them financially (through reprisals on those Blacks who agitated), and kill them indiscriminately was no mystery to Blacks in Mississippi. However, the connection between this treatment and their lack of enfranchisement had to be made in order for Blacks to demand the vote. This connection, argues Moses, spurred on the movement for the vote. "… Blacks saw what hadn’t been clear to them before: a connection between political participation, and food on their table." (p. 62)

Through his writings, Moses urges Blacks, Latinos and other minorities to make a similar connection- albeit this time between, math literacy and survival. To help them make this connection, Moses outlines the transformation of our nation from an industrially driven economy to a technologically driven one. He argues that this transformation has imposed new requirements on our educational system and has made math illiteracy -once acceptable- no longer tolerable. Illiteracy in mathematics, he argues, cripples a persons’ opportunities for the most basic of all career opportunities. Math illiteracy, explains Moses is not unique to Blacks. However, he argues, "it affects Blacks and minorities much, much more intensely, making them the designated serfs of the information age just as the people that we worked with in the 1960s on the plantations were Mississippi’s serfs then." (p. 11)

Boldly, Moses makes the connection between the systemic, oppressive and biased educational system of tracking and the persistence of disproportionate levels of Black, Latino and poor peoples in our nation’s penal and correctional facilities. By making this connection, and demonstrating it to students, parents and communities, he hopes to help them to agitate for better academic and mathematics preparation in middle schools. Moses posits that addressing this connection does not depend on large school system’s pity, but on Black, Latino and minority communities’ power. Communities, then, are not at the mercy of an outside agency, but hold within their own hands, the power to demand quality, rigorous mathematics courses. Because, as Moses argues, schools will only change when students and communities demand that they change.

It becomes clear through this book that the Algebra Project is not one of empty slogans such as, "Say Nope to Dope," or "Yes I Can!" In addition to introducing and teaching middle school students a rigorous algebra curriculum, the Algebra Project helps students make the connection between their achievement in mathematics and their future career opportunities. In the following discussion, Moses addresses a group of 120 middle school students in Mississippi who he has been teaching. The students have just learned that their school will only offer two Algebra I classes. This low offering of courses will eliminate at least half of the children that Moses and his staff had been training through the Algebra Project. In a school meeting, Moses addresses the children directly,

I can’t make you take algebra. But, this is why we want you to. Algebra opens the door to college preparation. You may not go to college but if you don’t go it should not be because you haven’t prepared yourself to go. Society is already prepared to write you off the way sharecroppers up in the Delta have been written off. They say you don’t want to learn. You can change that and you have to decide whether or not you want to do it. I can’t do that for you.

This discussion and the ensuing demands that the teachers and students placed upon the middle school forced the creation of three more Algebra I courses.

In one telling story, 22 eighth grade students from Weldon, North Carolina demanded to have an Algebra class at their middle school. No teacher could be found who was willing to teach the children. Finally, one teacher agreed to teach the students pre-algebra (which they had taken the previous year). Unsatisfied, the students brought their parents to a meeting with tutors from the Algebra Project. In the meeting parents urged their children to be patient with the school and wait until an algebra teacher could be found. One of the 8th grade students stood up and remarked, "I don’t have time to be patient about my education." (p. 162) It is moving to see a 14-year-old child taking responsibility for her own education. It is even more powerful to see that her agitation resulted in the development of an after school and weekend Algebra course. At the end of the school year those 22 students demonstrated their power even more. Eighty five percent of those students scored at or above the state’s standard for proficiency on the state Algebra I examination. (p. 163)

Other testimonies include the long list of Algebra Project students who have graduated from college with degrees in mathematics, increases in standardized test scores for those schools participating in the Project, a school of predominately poor Black students out-performing a white middle class school (that was acting as its mentor) on the state standardized exam, and an increase in the number of Black and minority students entering into honors algebra and geometry courses in the ninth grade.

In the final analysis, the power of Moses’ book lies in his candidness about the limits and possibilities of the Algebra Project. He does not present his project as a ready- made, "one size fits all" reform. He acknowledges that change in schools must be systematic and therefore over time. "The Algebra Project is a process, not an event," Moses argues. Drawing on his insights from the civil rights movement, one of the most far-reaching movements in American history, Moses portrays the necessary landscape for reform. His belief remains the same; that change happens when people internalize and make real for themselves a need for that change.

Moses’ book challenges us as reformers to consider how we both envision and carry out school reform. It forces us to acknowledge the inherent short comings of any school reform not conceived in the hearts and voices of those most closely connected to it.

Moses’ book speaks to us as educational reformers. We must make the connection between our children’s education and their survival. Then, we must generate networks and means of getting our children academically prepared. Disproportionate lower level tracking of poor and minority students will end when poor and minority students arrive at the doorsteps of high school prepared and ready to engage the college preparatory curriculum. This preparation will happen when we demand that it does.

In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed. This means that we are going to have to learn to think in radical terms. I use the term radical in its original meaning- getting down to and understanding the root cause. It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system. - Ella Baker

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has. It never will. - Frederick Douglas

References

Moses, R. P., & Cobb, C.E. (2001). Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights. Boston: Beacon Press.

Joi Spencer is a UCLA PhD. student in Urban Planning.

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