The Algebra Project & National Student Bill of Rights
(Editor’s Note: Get comfy kids. Yes, I found a video and stumbled into a rabbit hole. H/T PatriotsNetwork for the video.)
The Algebra Project:
The Algebra Project was founded in 1982 by a Harlem-born and Harvard-educated Civil Rights’ leader, Dr. Robert P. Moses through the use of his MacArthur Fellowship award. Over the past two decades, AP grew from teaching math in one school in Cambridge, MA, to more than 200 middle schools across the country by the late 1990s, developing successful models of whole-school and community change.
AP’s unique approach to school reform intentionally develops sustainable, student-centered models by building coalitions of stakeholders within the local communities, particularly the historically underserved population. Since 2000, we have continued to provide the context in which students, schools, parents and communities maximize local resources and take ownership of their own community building and mathematics education reform efforts, which now include high school as well as middle grade initiatives.
The civil rights work in the 1960s culminated in the national response to protect a fundamental right: the right to vote. Our current work seeks a national response to establish a fundamental right: the right of every child to a quality public school education.
I cannot let these two groups, (The Algebra Project and Young People’s Project), and this particular topic go by without some attention, as the propaganda and indoctrination continues (and yes, Soros is in the background).
In a simple nutshell: Robert Moses, a civil rights’ activist (who was mentored by Ella Baker; bio here) started the Algebra Project with funding from a MacArthur Fellowship to tutor and elevate the math scores of disenfranchised and minority children to help them be more prepared for higher learning institutions. It sounds like a noble, worthy goal that no one would deny until one hears about the National Student Bill of Rights from an Baltimore Algebra Project member and realizes that these children do not know who exactly is directing them.
For people who don’t know what the Algebra Project is; it is a youth run tutoring program where high school students and also some older members who are in college (like me) tutor math for an hour and a half after school and also organize for quality education as a Constitutional right. So, it’s a youth run program where the tutors are actually paid to improve the math skills and math literacy, build political awareness and exercise political power as students, as young people. – Chris Goodman (Rap Name: Comrade), Baltimore City Algebra Project
We’ve been working on a National Student Bill of rights…some of those rights include free college, free public transportation, clean bathrooms, no more standardized tests. So we are in the process of really getting students to have these dialogues in their classrooms, outside the classroom, all over the place…”
As readers now have a nutshell understanding of the Algebra Project, let’s drill down a bit and further the education.
Robert Moses bio from the Algebra Project’s Board of Director’s page:
Dr. Robert P. Moses
President and Founder
In his young adult life, Dr. Moses was a pivotal organizer for the civil rights movement as field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and was director of SNCC’s Mississippi Project. He was a driving force behind the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964 in organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which challenged the Mississippi regulars at the 1964 Democratic Convention. From 1969-1976, he worked for the Ministry of Education in Tanzania, East Africa, where he was chairperson of the math department at the Samé school. Dr. Moses returned to the USA in 1976 to continue to pursue doctoral studies in Philosophy at Harvard. A MacArthur Foundation Fellow from 1982-87, Dr. Moses used his fellowship to develop the concept for the Algebra Project, wherein mathematics literacy in today’s information age is as important to educational access and citizenship for inner city and rural poor middle and high school students as the right to vote was to political access and citizenship for sharecroppers and day laborers in Mississippi in the 1960s. As founder and president of the Algebra Project Inc., Dr. Moses also serves as director of the project’s materials development program. See more at www.algebra.org. Together with Algebra Project Inc. board member Danny Glover, Moses and others recently launched a national discussion calling for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution for Quality Public School Education as a Civil Right; see more at www.qecr.org. Dr. Moses has received several college and university honorary degrees and honors, including the Heinz Award for the Human Condition and the Nation/Puffin Prize for Creative Citizenship.
More information about Ella Baker’s mentoring of Robert Moses, SNCC, MFDP, and her influence on Students for a Democratic Society:
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (1960-1966)
That same year, on the heels of regional desegregation sit-ins led by black college students, Baker persuaded the SCLC to invite southern university students to the Southwide Youth Leadership Conference at Shaw University on Easter weekend. At this meeting the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed.
The SNCC became the most active organization in the Delta, and it was relatively open to women. Following the conference Baker resigned from the SCLC and began a long and intimate relationship with SNCC (pronounced “snick”). Along with Howard Zinn, Baker was one of SNCC’s highly revered adult advisors, called the “Godmother of SNCC.”
In 1961 Ella Baker persuaded the SNCC to form two wings: One wing for direct action and the Second wing for voter registration. It was with Baker’s help that SNCC (along with Congress of Racial Equality) coordinated the region-wide freedom rides of 1961 and began to work closely with black sharecroppers and others throughout the South. Ella Baker insisted that “strong people don’t need strong leaders,” and criticized the notion that a single charismatic leader at the helm of movements for social change.
Ella Baker pushed the idea of “Participatory Democracy”, therefore, she wanted each person to get involved individually. She also argued that “people under the heel,” referring to the most oppressed sectors of any community, “had to be the ones to decide what action they were going to take to get (out) from under their oppression.” She was a teacher and mentor to the young people of SNCC, highly influencing the thinking of such important figures as Julian Bond, Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, Curtis Muhammad, Bob Moses, and Bernice Johnson Reagon, who wrote a song in Baker’s honor, called “Ella’s Song.” Through SNCC, Baker’s ideas of group-centered leadership and the need for radical democratic social change spread throughout the student movements of the 1960s. Her ideas influenced the philosophy of participatory democracy put forth by Students for a Democratic Society, the major antiwar group of the day. These ideas also influenced a wide range of radical and progressive groups that would form in the 60s and 70s.
In 1964 she helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) as an alternative to the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party. She worked as the coordinator of the Washington office of the MFDP and accompanied a delegation of the MFDP to the National Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1964. The group’s aim was to challenge the national party to affirm the rights of African Americans to participate in party elections in the South. When MFDP delegates challenged the pro-segregationist, all-white official delegation, a major conflict ensued. The MFDP delegation was not seated, but their influence on the Democratic Party helped to elect many black leaders in Mississippi and forced a rule change to allow women and minorities to sit as delegates at the Democratic National Convention.
Many of my readers have heard the name Ella Baker because of Van Jones, the co-founder of the Ella Baker Center in Oakland, California who wrote STORM: Reclaiming Revolution and is beating the ‘social justice and green jobs’ drums, but let’s get back to Robert Moses, The Algebra Project and an offshoot of TAP, Young People’s Project. As of 2007, TAP was being supported by The Tides Foundation and the Ford Foundation, among others. Also, Robert Moses is the recipient of the 1999 Heinz Award in Human Condition netting him $250,000. Does the ‘Heinz’ name sound familiar? It probably does because John Kerry’s wife is the heir to the Heinz family fortune and the founder of the Heinz Award, and benefactor to many left-wing organizations including Tides.
Teresa Heinz Kerry is Board Chairwoman of the Heinz Family Foundation, Board Chairwoman of the Howard Heinz Endowment, and a Board member of the Vira I. Heinz Endowment. Collectively these are known as the Heinz Family Philanthropies, grant-making institutions that fund primarily leftwing causes. Teresa is the widow of Senator H. John Heinz III, and the current wife of Democratic Senator John Kerry.
Through her various foundations, Mrs. Heinz Kerry has given millions of dollars to a host of far-left groups, with a special focus on environmentalist causes. Key recipients of her funding include the Tides Foundation; the Tides Center; the Environmental Defense Fund; Earth Action Network; Global Exchange; the Natural Resources Defense Council; the Environmental Media Association; the Brookings Institution; the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund; the Earth Island Institute; Oxfam America; Physicians for Social Responsibility; the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund; the Nature Conservancy; the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund; the Feminist Majority Foundation; the Union of Concerned Scientists; the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition; the Sierra Club; the Waterkeeper Alliance; ACORN; the National Urban League; and the Izaak Walton League of America.
Moving along we come to the 1996 offshoot of The Algebra Project, the Young People’s Project:
The Young People’s Project (YPP) is an outgrowth of the Algebra Project, “a national mathematics literacy effort aimed at helping low income students and students of color successfully acquire mathematical skills that are a prerequisite for a college preparatory mathematics sequence in high school and full citizenship in today’s technological society.” YPP joins the Algebra Project in its belief that all the children who live in the country are children of the country and that they have the right to a high quality public school education.
A brief cruise around YPP’s Board Members’ page brings forth this interesting tidbit of information:
Committee Chair
Jessy Molina
Jessy Molina graduated from Harvard College in 1999 and from Yale Law School in 2002. Upon graduation from law school, Jessy accepted a Soros Justice Fellowship to work at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights on the Books Not Bars project, with the goal of shifting state funding priorities away from incarceration and toward education and youth opportunities. After completing her fellowship, Jessy worked for the John Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at Stanford University. As Program Director for the Gardner Center’s West Oakland youth initiative, she worked with high school students at McClymonds High School in Oakland to develop and implement a youth-led social justice curriculum. Jessy currently serves as National Co-Coordinator of Quality Education as a Constitutional Right (www.qecr.org), along with her husband, Michael Molina. Jessy enjoys learning from and with the young people she works with, especially her daughter, Maya.
Soros Justice Fellowships
The Soros Justice Fellowships fund outstanding individuals to implement innovative projects that advance the efforts of the Open Society Foundations to reform the U.S. criminal justice system. The foundations seek to reduce the destructive impact of current criminal justice policies on the lives of individuals, families, and communities in the United States by challenging the overreliance on incarceration and harsh punishment, and ensuring a fair and equitable system of justice.
Fellows receive funding through the following two categories:
Advocacy
Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowships fund outstanding individuals—including lawyers, advocates, grassroots organizers, activist academics, and others with important perspectives—to initiate innovative policy advocacy projects at the local, state, and national levels.
View the Advocacy Fellowship guidelines.
A never ending rat-maze of progressives that definitely understand how to brainwash an entire country over the course of generations through the indoctrination of our children. When enough generations of children are taught to be good little worker bees as part of the collective hive, America’s great experiment will have ended without so much as a whimper.
