From Mississippi to Miami

Florida International University recruits legendary civil rights activist Bob Moses and his nationally recognized math literacy project

By Ronald Roach

Few historic episodes in American history have imparted a more potent plea for social justice and inclusion than the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. In the past two decades, legendary activist Bob Moses has channeled the best of the civil rights tradition into a campaign of school reform and curriculum development with the nationally acclaimed Algebra Project.
Yet for all the national recognition it has attained and its deep roots in the civil rights movement, the Algebra Project has only recently secured a formal affiliation with a major university. Earlier this year, the project, which has been based in Cambridge, Mass., gained an academic home at the Center for Urban Education and Innovation at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, and made Moses an eminent scholar at the center.
 The move to FIU represents for both the Center for Urban Education and Innovation and Moses a win-win situation, according to officials.
"We're pleased to have Bob Moses and the Algebra Project at the center. The work that he does is transforming instruction for kids who have not been served well by the education system," says Dr. Lisa Delpit, the executive director of the Center for Urban Education and Innovation.
Since joining as executive director in 2002, Delpit, a winner of a MacArthur "Genius" award, has been pushing the center, which was launched in 1997, to a position of national prominence and influence on the improvement of the education of minority and disadvantaged schoolchildren. The recruitment of Moses and the development of ties to pre-eminent education scholars such as Dr. Asa Hilliard III, Dr. Pedro Noguera, Dr. Theresa Perry, and Dr. Charles Payne is generating attention for the center.
"I wasn't looking to go anywhere. The opportunity came out of the blue," Moses says about Delpit recruiting him to join the center.
Delpit says she had known Moses for many years and believed the Algebra Project was a good fit for the center. Already, the center has begun supporting a teaching fellow from the FIU College of Education who's working at an Algebra Project site in Jackson, Miss. The student will eventually return to FIU to pursue his doctorate in education. Another part of the goal in bringing Moses to FIU will be the establishment of an Algebra Project initiative in the Miami-Dade County schools with whom the center is currently developing a partnership that will focus on improving the system's lowest performing schools. Moses will also teach courses in the FIU College of Education.
Moses, who attained legendary status for his heroic leadership and courage during the Mississippi voting rights campaigns of the 1960s, has used civil rights strategies to organize and motivate middle school children to study mathematics. Reaching about 10,000 students annually at 28 sites around the nation, the Algebra Project is one of the nation's best recognized school reform efforts to focus on math literacy. A study of Algebra Project graduates in Cambridge, Mass., found 92 percent of graduates went on to upper-level mathematics courses in ninth grade, twice the rate of students not in the project.
 "Math literacy is the key to 21st-century citizenship," Moses says.  
The belief in that credo and the work of the Algebra Project recently earned Moses a 2004 Harold W. McGraw Jr. Prize in Education, which honors "educators dedicated to closing the achievement gap between Black and Hispanic students and their White and Asian-American counterparts." The prize is one of several national awards, including a prestigious MacArthur Foundation "Genius" award, that Moses has collected over the years for his work with the Algebra Project.
"(Moses) created the Algebra Project to help middle school students make the conceptual shift from arithmetic to algebra so they can be prepared for algebra in the eighth grade, and thus a college preparatory math sequence in high school," wrote U.S. Congressman Michael Capuano, D-Mass., in the Congressional Record in late September following the McGraw prize ceremony.