Algebra Project

This is the name of a curriculum for mathematics education born out of indignation for the apathy commonly found in schools of the inner city and rural areas. Robert P. Moses, a veteran of the civil rights struggles of the late 1960s, is the originator of this program. For this work, he drew on experiences helping the black community of Mississippi seek political power through the vote. In the South, he had discovered that gaining political power was not a simple matter of urging people to vote. There was a series of interrelated questions that had to be addressed: What is the vote for? Why do we want it in the first place? What must we do to ensure that it will work for us and will benefit our community? Answers to these questions resulted in important political consciousness building and to the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

In 1982, Moses found that a similar set of questions needed to be answered with respect to mathematics and students failing this subject. Moses, by then a celebrated mathematics educator and a [Page 65]MacArthur Fellow at the time, volunteered to help at a school in Massachusetts where large numbers of students were failing algebra. Moses, now a parentorganizer, approached the challenge of improving mathematics learning by posing, to the school staff and the parents, an initial set of questions (What is algebra for? Why do we want children to study it?), followed by the broad political questions, What does success in mathematics gain for you and your children? What does failure in mathematics deny you and your children? Once the relationship between success in mathematics and access to college was made, establishment of the content followed, along with the instructional approach of the mathematics program. Parent involvement and self-determination on the part of the students are important factors in the curriculum. The initial goal was that middle school students be engaged personally in the process of learning mathematics that would provide access to college preparatory courses in high school. The Algebra Project has since evolved to include courses in high school.

The political consciousness of individual parents, students, and teachers plays a key role in the Algebra Project. There are still many schools where inner-city and rural students are not expected to succeed. Moses accuses these schools of offering a sharecroppers' curriculum, where students are being prepared only to work for others and at minimum wage. The Algebra Project demands that mathematical literacy be accessible to all students, joining the traditional skills of reading and writing commonly associated with the term literacy. The struggle for citizenship and equality includes mathematical literacy, the Algebra Project asserts.

The Algebra Project's curriculum is interactive, calling for students to use their physical surroundings as references to mathematical ideas. The process can be summed up as having five steps: (1) Students experience an event, such as a field trip, followed by (2) creating a model or a picture of the event and then (3) writing about that event in an informal and creative manner. The language used to (4) describe the event is then formalized to accurately depict the activity. The last step is (5) the development of a symbolic representation of the event using mathematical concepts. The Algebra Project is being implemented in several urban and rural school districts in the United States, with high levels of success.

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