The Math Debacle in Baltimore Public Schools

It has recently become something of a public scandal that seventy or eighty Baltimore schools have 0, 1 or 2 students at the “proficient” level on state math tests. It isn’t really news. It isn’t just an effect of the pandemic. The public has had access to information for decades that shows generation after generation of Batimore’s children learn very little math beyond addition and subtraction. Fractions are a huge problem. Multiplication causes distress. The city schools track anyone who makes a good start on algebra in middle school to a few “selective” high schools; the chances of learning algebra, geometry, trigonometry or calculus at the other high schools is slim to none, as reported year after year in the state statistics. In fact, Baltimore City stopped administering the tests beyond Algebra I as a general policy even before the pandemic hit.

In the most recent data, 7% of Baltimore’s students are said to be “proficient” in math. City and state officials agree the tests are hard. But that only means that you have to actually know some math to do well on them. We don’t need the tests to tell us that most students don’t know much school mathematics in any way that is useful to them. You only have to sit down and discuss a topic to find that out. Bring a table of data to some 10th graders, say, gas prices changing over time. Ask: “Hey, are these prices changing faster this year or did they change faster last year?” Shouldn’t be hard. Several possible approaches to the question. If it were me, I’d pull out my phone and put some numbers into a calculator or spreadsheet to get an idea of how to answer. But most young people in Baltimore schools, or in any other economically oppressed district across the country, rural or urban, won’t even take a shot at a quantitative answer. They tend to answer questions like this without talkiing about the numbers: “They went up faster last year,” or “They went up faster this year.” When asked to explain why, many young people then appeal to their experience: “Our family needed $70 just to fill up our car last week.” This makes sense—to start figuring out a question based on intution and experience.

But because of the way the schools operate, young people need prompt after prompt to test or develop an intuition of this sort. “Let’s look at last year. Did the prices go up or down? How much? How do you know? What about this year? How much? O.k., How could you tell how fast the prices were changing? How do you tell how fast a car is moving? How is a speed or velocity measured? How is it calculated?” And so on. None of these questions are hard in themeselves. Students from very early grades through middle and high school can have good conversations about them. They can be coached through finding answers to speed questions, comparison questions, application to “real life” and so on. But left to themselves without coaching, many students will just leave mathematical questions alone. They haven’t learned to do mathematics in the sense of diving into a quantitative or spatial problem and seeing where it leads them. We generally say, “they aren’t engaged.”

The young people’s lack of engagement is evidence not of the students’ achievement, but of ours. We should be asking complex kinds of mathematical questions in schools and in neighborhoods from early ages, just as we ask children to talk about the plot of a movie or a book or to discuss something in the news. Why don’t we do this with math?

The main reason is that in economically oppressed communities young people are being trained to follow orders and not to think. They learn to ask, “When am I going to use algebra in real life?”, and they learn that from adults and older young people in their community. The answer they almost never hear: “In virtually every role that self-determining people have in the 21st century, abstract symbolic languages play an enormous part. You can’t participate in those roles without algebra and the symbolic languages algebra leads to.”

This is a fact that is so obvious, many relatively self-determining people don’t even realize it. Obviously, if you own a business—an aspiration for many of Baltimore’s young people—you need to do many kinds of complex math, even if your business doesn’t seem STEM-based at all. You need bank accounts, loans; have to deal with interest rates and taxes; do payroll; make budgets and quantitative predictions; estimate costs and cash flows, and on and on. If you try to do these things without technology, you’ll be much too slow to compete, and doing them with technology means understanding the abstract symbolic systems even simple user interfaces rely on. Virtually every job that gives some degree of autonomy to the employee requires the use of spreadsheets, databases, quantitative reports and analyses. Even if you aren’t doing these yourself, you are certainly working with people who are, and you have to have some idea of whether they make sense when they tell you something, or whether they are out to lunch. Vast numbers of people struggle with getting an economic foothold in adulthood because their inability to rapidly understand and react to quantitative information puts them at a disadvantage. Many end up settling for work or lifestyles much less empowering than they imagined, because the economic and social role they get assigned allows for only low level, subordinate style actions and little decision-making authority.

It is certainly true that being relegated to this subordinate status is often an effect of systemic racism. But the relegation isn’t justified any longer by reference to a person’s race. It is justified by reference to the person’s inability to function efficiently in a fast-paced, technically sophisticated world. At the college admission level, the rejection letters say, “We don’t think so and so will be able to meet the academic pressures of this institution.” When someone is denied a job or a promotion, the reason is, “simple assignments came back with too many errors, or too far behind schedule.” There is no need to invoke race, and indeed many white people might be dismissed for similar reasons. But the fact is that white people generally and especially those from more privileged backgrounds are surrounded from early ages by those who expect them to perform quantitative and technological tasks quickly and efficiently. If they have trouble, they are helped or outright rescued so that their deficiencies don't show.

It is also true that the barrier of mathematical or technical proficiency is experienced as a relatively vague fear or insecurity, whereas the barrier of being poor— lacking the money to buy someone’s time to help you, or to buy a program that does the math for you, or just buy a computer that doesn't glitch all the time—feels concrete, immediate and overwhelming.

The root of the problem, what is hidden by the idea that either the schools or the students are somehow failures, is that we have no expectation that the mass of students in poverty will ever truly need these sophisticated abstract skills. They are being prepared to do menial work, and need only learn how to submit and follow directions. They are being taught to accept the presence of control, surveillance and the violence of the state. The “standards", it is true, are intended for full participation in the technocratic world of the 21st century, but the fact that 93% of Baltimore’s children can't meet these standards surprises no one and offends very few. Few are offended because few believe the masses will ever be anything other than surplus labor.

The lack of math learning in Baltimore schools is indeed a scandal, but it isn't news, and certainly isn't a surprise. Things will change only when there is sufficient demand from students and families to access not a subordinate position in society, but a position of true self determination, which today includes command of abstract symbolic languages.

Missing the forest for the trees

We tend to look at the education problem with much too narrow a lens, missing the forest for the trees, as Bob Moses says.  Let’s step back a little and take a broader view.

The unfairness of unequal schooling is not only about textbooks, or teacher salaries, or “holding teachers accountable”, or even about curriculum that addresses the actual interests of students—although it is about those things.

The unfairness of unequal schooling is also about the large social and economic patterns of America, where rich people’s children are expected to have more opportunities than poor people’s children. That’s one of the main reasons that people want to be rich in America—exactly so that they’re children will have more opportunities.

We’ve had powerful evidence of this recently. In person school disappears, and suddenly the internet divide, homelessness and overcrowded housing, food insecurity, and underlying medical conditions are thrown into relief. People die who wouldn’t die if they were richer.

We don’t know how to have a conversation about that unfairness. So instead we talk about getting more computers in homes, or finally addressing the appalling physical plant of crumbling schools. In non-pandemic years we talk about capping class sizes at 30 students or 40 students, when we know that the fancy private schools have class sizes of 15.

That’s how rich families’ children learn math best—in a small class with a well paid and well respected teacher, lots of technology, field trips, tons of sports, great cafeteria food and so on. But the assumption is that what the fancy private schools do is simply out of reach for the rest of us, so why dream? We teachers, families, students committed to truly democratic education pick off “lower hanging fruit” and do our best.

I believe this approach of what are essentially timid demands is mistaken. I believe we should demand what we really need. And I also think that there are ways to frame demanding what we really need in a way that is actually a practical method for building up an equitable system of education for the country.

We should not settle for limited opportunities for poor children. We should aim to create in the relatively short term—the next 10 years—an education system that will make rich families think twice about sending their kids to the fancy private schools, because the public education system is so stimulating, so healthy, so vibrant, so luxurious and beautiful that their children wonder why they can’t go to public school, too.

What is hard for us to understand is that people who attend public schools—the students there right now—have enormous creative capacity—in economic terms, productive capacity—that is absurdly underutilized. Millions of adolescents with enormous energy, talent, and intelligence are having their time thoroughly wasted, when they should be working for the benefit of their communities. Their idleness is thought of as a problem! They have to be given things to occupy their time or they’ll cause trouble, get in fights, make babies, take drugs, disrupt lessons.

To me, this is crazy. Their energy and intelligence is an unbelievable opportunity! They could be teaching things, creating things, imagining and realizing things, and of course learning—because people learn by doing. We deliberately tie adolescents down, and then wonder why they don’t learn. They don’t learn, because we are so afraid of what they will do if they are moving their bodies with free will. The darker their skin, the more we are afraid that they “don’t want to learn” and that left to themselves they will cause trouble—physical, bodily trouble. This is crazy. It is crazy, and it is racist.

As a country we have separated young people in our imaginations into two groups: One group is entitled to the range of stimulation and opportunity that all young people crave. They are generally White or light-Brown and almost all from middle and upper-middle class socioeconomic status. They play sports, travel at will, drive their own cars when they’re 16, or have their parents drive them when they’re younger, go to camps in the summer, have significant allowances or (for the middle class) part-time jobs in suburban locations, are treated with respect by their teachers, party in safe places, get braces if their teeth are crooked, and eat very, very well. They and their parents spending on them is a major engine of the economy. The police don’t bother these adolescents, whose drug and alcohol use is mostly winked upon.

Then there are young people from places where families struggle with paying bills, keeping a roof over their heads, getting enough food to eat, finding transportation, medical and dental care. These young people bear the burden of the society’s suspicion: they are monitored, searched, threatened, feared, moved along, and often literally locked up. They learn to stay away from centers of public power, because it is dangerous for them in those places. Their opportunities become more and more constrained. They sit in the back. They wait till they are alone with their peers or families to speak up.

We know that the society is structured to keep these two groups of young people separated. But it’s all done with the almighty dollar—not signs that say “Whites only”, and so this segregation is perfectly legal. We don’t even question that a poor kid from a poor neighborhood should be entitled to attend a fancy private school with small classes, great food, and huge playing fields. The poor can’t pay, so they can’t go. Of course, if we think that young people should all have equal opportunity, this inequality is outrageous. But we Americans don’t think of it as outrageous, we just think it’s obvious. The rich get better education and way more non-educational opportunities of all sorts for their children. Why am I even bothering to bring this up? That’s certainly not going to change.

Well, I’m bothering to bring it up because we are looking at the problem when we look at it as a problem with “improving the quality of schools.” That’s a wrong approach—looking at a tree in the forest rather than the whole forest. The schools for oppressed young people are bad because the society is structured oppressively. You can’t “improve the quality of schools,” unless you understand that trying to do that means trying to change the structure of the whole society. It’s not just revolutionary in relation to education. It’s revolutionary in relation to the economic and political arrangements of the country—it’s not only anti-racist, it’s also anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-war.

AND—this is a big AND—we in the Algebra Project and Young People’s Project networks inherit the legacy of the Mississippi Theater of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1960s—Ella Baker’s and Bob Moses’s and Charlie Cobb’s and Bernice Johnson Reagan’s Movement. So we believe in something we call “earned insurgency.” We’re going to talk about this now for a bit, but the point is that a group of young people in the South in the early 1960s put there foot in the door of the larger society and wouldn’t let it slam shut, and then they pushed that door open in certain ways, changing substantially certain arrangements of the society.

They did not, however, succeed in changing enough, and so we are still wandering around lost in a huge forest of inequality. We need to try to figure out better where we are.

Politics in the Classroom

Right now, October 2020, the significance of voting in elections is an obvious political lesson to teach your class.

But in general, teaching politics in the classroom is not at all obvious.

I want to distinguish two kinds of radical political teaching, one of which most readers will easily recognize. The other kind of radical political teaching is less widely practiced and harder to see as political. We could call these the Saul Alinsky approach and the Ella Baker approach. Both are good; both are important.

The first kind is often brilliant “social justice” teaching, practiced in many classrooms. In math, for example, take a look at the outstanding, recently published High School Mathematics Lessons to Explore, Understand, and Respond to Social Injustice.[*]  Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change, as two other examples, have been successful for almost 35 years in influencing curriculum and pedagogy, including how topics like Columbus’s explorations or the Civil Rights Movement are taught, and how the literary canon is constructed and represented in schools. Many wonderful teachers create their own units and lessons that provoke students into seeing the world politically, and many students have been changed because of this teaching.

I call this the Saul Alinsky approach because the core of the approach is the curriculum as brought to the students by the teacher. Alinksy’s powerful and influential organizing method is centered on a thoughtful, disciplined campaign-based practice. An organizing campaign is identified, local leadership developed, strategy and creative tactics planned (often by the trained, external lead organizer), and the targeted authorities then brought to task in public “accountability sessions” orchestrated by the leadership. The goal is political power.

But there is another, often overlapping, approach to teaching radical politics in classrooms that derives more from the organizing approach associated with Ella Baker. Baker’s approach relies on a less leader-centered group of “workers” who see themselves as determining the direction their group will take, the projects they will work on, the campaigns they will develop. There is still a crucial role for organizers in guiding, questioning, and attracting resources for the group. But the goal of the Baker-style organizer is not only power; the goal of the Baker-style organizer is better described as a change in how people understand their role in the world. It is a change from seeing ourselves as people who do as we are told, to seeing ourselves as people struggling with the problem of acting rightly in concert with our peers and communities.

In classrooms, this approach to teaching radical politics surfaces as democratic processes where young people learn two crucial skills: (1) to represent themselves, and not let anyone speak for them; (2) to make demands on themselves and on their peers because they see themselves and no one else as responsible for their group’s unity, equity, civility, security, welfare, freedom, and education.

The pedagogy of the Algebra Project and the Young People’s Project, for example, sees mathematics knowledge as emerging in communities of learners in exactly the way that the demand for voting rights emerged from sharecroppers and day laborers in 1960s Mississippi. Before the sharecroppers could effectively make a demand on the country, they had to first make a demand on themselves and on their peers--to study; to learn to talk and listen to each other about political questions; to risk life, limb, and livelihood by coalescing around consensus strategies for getting the vote.

Similarly, students in oppressed communities must learn how to make demands on themselves and on their peers--to study; to learn to talk and listen to each other about what they are studying, including, crucially, mathematics; to risk missing out on shorter term pleasures, by investing time and effort in longer term collective, self-determined goals. The content of the class might be apparently technical: quadratic functions, for example. But if students have learned to decide, individually and collectively, that they want to understand quadratic functions, to apply them, to use them, to talk about them, because they feel powerful, individually and collectively, when they do math, then they are also doing politics.

These practices embody “social justice” even when the topics being studied are not obviously political. Teachers are teaching for political change whenever they see their work as protecting space for young people to organize themselves in pursuit of their own consensual goals. It’s hard to protect that kind of space. Most institutions, starting with schools, try to prevent young people, workers, women, or any oppressed people from organizing for self-determination.  Supporting students in democratically determining their own shared purposes will likely get you into trouble, especially when the students become skilled in fighting for freedom and for resources to pursue those purposes. But this is an important form of political teaching, too: teaching the forms of freedom and collective self-determination, and teaching the risks that justice entails.

It turns out that Alinsky style social justice teaching often fits fairly well within the typical school structure. Lessons can be engaging, challenging, and rewarding, and are usually easy to “align” with standards and testing indicators. A good social justice curriculum also involves lots of student-to-student talk, and students can even learn to teach the lessons themselves to peers or near peers, or even to teach the lessons to teachers as professional development (for which, of course, the students should be paid). The system’s and the students’ interests may seem to coincide.

Baker style social justice teaching becomes more problematic for schools, but it can get off the ground as relatively innocuous when it is dealing with what seems to be “non-political” content, like traditional  math topics: solving equations, functions, and so on. The problem for schools and school systems (or for colleges and universities) develops as young people begin to get good at collective self-representation and self-organization. They can then take the methods of collective self-organization that they have been taught to use in learning math (or history, or science), and begin to apply the methods to areas where their own interests and the interests of the system diverge: resource allocation, class size, cultural studies curriculum, policing, and so on.

The contests that result at that point are what the Algebra Project calls an “earned insurgency.” “Insurgency” because the students’ interests diverge from the system’s interests. “Earned” because the students’ mastery of math, history, science, research, writing, and speaking is what the system and the larger society said it wanted all along.

[*] By Robert O. Berry III, Basil M. Conway IV, Brian R. Lawler, and John W. Stacey (Corwin Press, 2020).

Food Insecurity, the Pandemic, and Young People's Economic Need

We vastly underestimate the underlying need for cash that students in poverty face every day.

Young people themselves are clear on this need. They are always looking for a way to pick up some money, a job, a hustle, a friend with money, a relative with a little extra.

But young people think of this as a private problem that is their own business. They generally don’t think of it as a public problem that they can organize around.

Policy makers and most adults tend to bury our heads in the sand on the question of young people’s need for cash. For middle class families, youth jobs are mainly a question of character building. A summer job is good for a teenager to learn responsibility, to learn the “value of money”, to get a sense of independence and autonomy. The cash in the teen’s pocket relieves parents of the necessity to constantly fork out for allowances and phone bills, but it doesn’t make or break the family budget.

But in families with little or no wealth to fall back on and with generally insufficient income, the income teenagers bring in—not only in the summer, but year-round—is absolutely crucial to well-being.

In fact, young people can’t concentrate on education if their family is economically distressed, and the older they get, the more they understand that the level of the family’s economic stress depends partly on them. Are they contributors, or just drains?

The pandemic has revealed this reality in rather a stark way. Of course, everyone agrees students need to eat if they are going to be able to put effort into school. And everyone agrees that if families aren’t able to provide enough food for all their children, the children need to be fed some other way.

So schools slowly took on more and more of the responsibility for feeding children, and generally, the citizenry thinks this is a good thing.

But the pandemic made feeding children at school problematic, and suddenly it became clear just how desperate the food insecurity problem really is. Does anyone really think that just because a student can get some kind of very basic meal at school in a normal, non-pandemic year, that their anxiety about having enough to eat disappears?

No. The same panic that is obvious in the pandemic is actually present in the lives of the young people and their families in every “normal” year, too. Food insecurity, and housing insecurity, and health care insecurity, are constant, grinding, and overwhelming always.

Learning does not depend on a few handouts to children in poverty. Learning requires actual security.

And security depends concretely on having enough family income to actually meet all of the family’s needs.

This is one of the reasons that paying young people for sharing their knowledge with their peers is so important. They need cash, lots of it, year-round in order to be able to concentrate on their education.

Peer-to-peer teaching during the pandemic

One strength of peer- and near-peer teaching is that young people use communication networks that are often unavailable to teachers and school districts.

Of course, many students are connected through social media networks, and they are also connected through family and community networks, as well.

Schools should ask young people to help them mitigate the “distance” problem in “distance-learning” by paying them to activate their social networks on behalf of the schools’ engagement goals.

Students naturally reach out to each other for various kinds of school related information. But they could structure their intra-group communication much more effectively if we added some intentionality through cash payments and thoughtful organizing.

For example, a high school teacher could invite four or five of their students to become co-teachers in this year’s course. Those few students and the teacher might meet virtually once or twice a week to learn the week’s material. (We’re going to set aside the important question of “What material?” for later posts.)

The co-teachers can invite their various network contacts within the teacher’s class to participate in small “affinity groups.” The co-teaching students can help their affinity group get access to the teacher’s materials, can help clarify assignments, and troubleshoot questions or confusions. Student co-teachers can also make friendly attempts to contact students who aren’t engaged and find out what’s going on--completely in confidence.

Co-teachers would need to be paid serious money, and there would have to be a way to decide expectations and responsibilities for compensation. Teams of students could certainly develop these parameters in a way that was fair, and they could also check in with each other through peer accountability structures, to ensure work was being performed.

The benefits of even a few such co-teaching teams in a single school would be great. Of course, the students involved as co-teachers will learn more in the subject area. But also, all the students in the class—co-teachers and the other students—would begin to understand themselves as contributing to and helping to determine the learning environment. This change in perception—from consumer of education services to co-producer of real learning—is a crucial element missing from many reformist projects.

Teachers can still review work products, comment and interact—either directly with each student, or indirectly through the co-teachers. The point is, everyone is involved in positive interactions around the content of the course, rather than in negative interactions around what the young people are failing to accomplish.

People can come up with many objections to this idea: Where will the money come from? What about confidentiality? What if the co-teaching students give wrong information to their peers? What does a co-teaching student do if they learn about a situation that a teacher would have to report to authorities by law?, etc.

All good questions, and all questions that groups of human beings in their local circumstances are capable of wrestling with, learning from, and gradually solving to a greater or lesser extent. Open dialogue builds trust, knowledge, and competence, and slowly raises the quality of social interactions. Rough spots and conflict are to be expected, but there’s no way to avoid the rough spots and conflict. Either you deal with them in the open, or you sweep them under the rug.

I’m delighted to help anyone who wants to try to get structures like this started. Feel free to reach out:  Twitter:  @jaymgillen  email: gillen.jay@gmail.com or contact me on the website: Educate4Insurgency.org