We are still in the early days of understanding the promise and peril of using generative AI in education. Very few researchers have evaluated whether students are benefiting, and one well-designed study showed that using ChatGPT for math actually harmed student achievement. 

The first scientific proof I’ve seen that ChatGPT can actually help students learn more was posted online earlier this year. It’s a small experiment, involving fewer than 200 undergraduates.  All were Harvard students taking an introductory physics class in the fall of 2023, so the findings may not be widely applicable. But students learned more than twice as much in less time when they used an AI tutor in their dorm compared with attending their usual physics class in person. Students also reported that they felt more engaged and motivated. They learned more and they liked it. 

A paper about the experiment has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but other physicists at Harvard University praised it as a well-designed experiment. Students were randomly assigned to learn a topic as usual in class, or stay “home” in their dorm and learn it through an AI tutor powered by ChatGPT. Students took brief tests at the beginning and the end of class, or their AI sessions, to measure how much they learned. The following week, the in-class students learned the next topic through the AI tutor in their dorms, and the AI-tutored students went back to class. Each student learned both ways, and for both lessons – one on surface tension and one on fluid flow –  the AI-tutored students learned a lot more. 

To avoid AI “hallucinations,” the tendency of chatbots to make up stuff that isn’t true, the AI tutor was given all the correct solutions. But other developers of AI tutors have also supplied their bots with answer keys. Gregory Kestin, a physics lecturer at Harvard and developer of the AI tutor used in this study, argues that his effort succeeded while others have failed because he and his colleagues fine-tuned it with pedagogical best practices. For example, the Harvard scientists instructed this AI tutor to be brief, using no more than a few sentences, to avoid cognitive overload. Otherwise, he explained, ChatGPT has a tendency to be “long-winded.”

The tutor, which Kestin calls “PS2 Pal,” after the Physical Sciences 2 class he teaches, was told to only give away one step at a time and not to divulge the full solution in a single message. PS2 Pal was also instructed to encourage students to think and give it a try themselves before revealing the answer. 

Unguided use of ChatGPT, the Harvard scientists argue, lets students complete assignments without engaging in critical thinking. 

Kestin doesn’t deliver traditional lectures. Like many physicists at Harvard, he teaches through a method called “active learning,” where students first work with peers on in-class problem sets as the lecturer gives feedback. Direct explanations or mini-lectures come after a bit of trial, error and struggle. Kestin sought to reproduce aspects of this teaching style with the AI tutor. Students toiled on the same set of activities and Kestin fed the AI tutor the same feedback notes that he planned to deliver in class.

Kestin provocatively titled his paper about the experiment, “AI Tutoring Outperforms Active Learning,” but in an interview he told me that he doesn’t mean to suggest that AI should replace professors or traditional in-person classes. 

“I don’t think that this is an argument for replacing any human interaction,” said Kestin. “This allows for the human interaction to be much richer.”

Kestin says he intends to continue teaching through in-person classes, and he remains convinced that students learn a lot from each other by discussing how to solve problems in groups. He believes the best use of this AI tutor would be to introduce a new topic ahead of class – much like professors assign reading in advance. That way students with less background knowledge won’t be as behind and can participate more fully in class activities. Kestin hopes his AI tutor will allow him to spend less time on vocabulary and basics and devote more time to creative activities and advanced problems during class.

Of course, the benefits of an AI tutor depend on students actually using it. In other efforts, students often didn’t want to use earlier versions of education technology and computerized tutors. In this experiment, the “at-home” sessions with PS2 Pal were scheduled and proctored over Zoom. It’s not clear that even highly motivated Harvard students will find it engaging enough to use regularly on their own initiative. Cute emojis – another element that the Harvard scientists prompted their AI tutor to use – may not be enough to sustain long-term interest. 

Kestin’s next step is to test the tutor bot for an entire semester. He’s also been testing PS2 Pal as a study assistant with homework. Kestin said he’s seeing promising signs that it’s helpful for basic but not advanced problems. 

The irony is that AI tutors may not be that effective at what we generally think of as tutoring. Kestin doesn’t think that current AI technology is good at anything that requires knowing a lot about a person, such as what the student already learned in class or what kind of explanatory metaphor might work.

“Humans have a lot of context that you can use along with your judgment in order to guide a student better than an AI can,” he said. In contrast, AI is good at introducing students to new material because you only need “limited context” about someone and “minimal judgment” for how best to teach it. 

Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at (212) 678-3595 or barshay@hechingerreport.org.

This story about an AI tutor was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

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Imagine engineering students retrofitting campus buildings to make them more energy efficient. Or students in a human behavior class applying what they’ve learned to encourage cafeteria visitors to waste less food.

Efforts like these are part of an instructional approach known as the “campus as a living lab,” in which classroom teaching mixes with on-the-ground efforts to decarbonize campuses. Earlier this year, I visited the State University of New York to see the living lab model in action.

During my trip, I sat in on a business class as students pitched their proposals for greening the New Paltz campus. They’d researched topics including solar energy and composting, acquiring skills in project management and finance as they developed their business plans. Students I spoke with said the fact that the projects had a chance of becoming reality — thanks to money from a university “green revolving fund” — helped the lessons stick.

“A lot of projects are kind of like simulations,” Madeleine Biles, a graduating senior, told me. “This one was real life.”

I was struck by how professors in fields as diverse as theater, economics and architecture were participating in the “living lab” model. Former NPR education reporter Anya Kamenetz writes about a related trend in her latest column for Hechinger: Colleges embedding climate-related content into all sorts of classes — sociology, history, English literature, French.

“We want every major to be a climate major,” Toddi Steelman, vice president and vice provost for climate and sustainability at Duke University, told Anya. “Our responsibility is to ensure we have educated our students to capably deal with these challenges and identify the solutions. Whatever they do — preachers, teachers, nurses, engineers, legislators — if they have some sort of background in climate and sustainability, they will carry that into their first job and the next job.”

Research take

This is Planet Ed, the Aspen Institute initiative on climate and education, highlighted strategies like these and more in its recent plan for how colleges and universities can respond to the climate crisis. The report talks about higher ed’s role primarily in four areas:

• Educating and supporting students: Higher ed can ensure all students obtain a basic level of climate literacy and also prepare students for jobs in renewable energy and related fields. One example: The Kern Community College system, in California, is attempting to move away from training students for oil jobs to jobs in carbon management.
• Engaging people in communities where colleges are located: Higher ed can convene and support community leaders as they develop climate plans. For example, the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University has worked with predominantly Black communities in the Gulf Coast to mitigate environmental harms.  
• Developing solutions for climate mitigation: Colleges must reduce their own climate footprint and prepare their campuses for climate risks. Some examples: Arizona State University has a “campus metabolism dashboard” that allows students, faculty and staff to track their resource use, while at Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida, 85 percent of its 41 campus vehicles are electric.  
• Putting equity at the center of their climate work: Colleges can prioritize support for students most affected by climate and educational inequities, and historically Black colleges and universities, tribal colleges, and other institutions that serve such individuals must be part of climate planning. The HBCU Climate Change Consortium, for example, strives to diversify the pipeline of environmental leaders.

The interview

I spoke with John B. King Jr., chancellor of the State University of New York and co-chair of This is Planet Ed, about higher ed’s role in fighting climate change and how it’s reshaping childhood. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What are you doing at SUNY to combat climate change?

One of the first things I did was name a chief sustainability officer, Carter Strickland. He has convened a task force that is developing a system-wide climate action plan to address campus sustainability practices and educate students around climate issues and for green jobs. He also has worked with our campuses on their clean energy master plans. Each of our state operating campuses has identified what steps they need to take to get to the 2045 net-zero [greenhouse gas emissions] goal. We changed our algorithm for prioritizing capital projects to build in climate, so we are doing a number of projects that involve geothermal.

According to the nonprofit group Second Nature, only about 12 universities are carbon neutral. Why can’t SUNY and other universities move faster to reduce their carbon footprint?

It really comes down to capital. For our state-operating campuses, we project it’s going to take something like $10 billion in capital investment to get to our net zero targets. We also have a substantial critical maintenance backlog of $7 billion or $8 billion dollars. One way we’re trying to reconcile this challenge is as we do renovations of buildings, we are taking steps to make them as energy efficient as possible. We are adding more charging stations, we’re moving our fleets to electric, we’re changing out light fixtures, we are phasing in a ban on single-use plastic. We do think the Inflation Reduction Act may be a help because of the direct pay provision [which provides universities and other nonprofits payment equivalent to the value of tax credits for qualifying clean energy projects].

Could this result in students having to pay more to attend SUNY schools?

No. Our hope is that the governor and legislature will work with us to develop a comprehensive capital plan.

How is climate change already reshaping childhood?

Sadly. We already see school being disrupted regularly by extreme weather events, whether that’s hurricanes or heat waves. There is growing data on the negative impact of high temperatures on student learning. We already are seeing the negative consequences of climate change for the student experience. If you think about being a kid in Phoenix where it’s well over 100 for days, you’re not going to be able to play outside. But I do think increasingly you are seeing K-12 trying to engage students in how they can be a part of the solution — and students are demanding that.

Resources and events

• As this summer — the hottest on record — nears an end, I’m looking forward to several sessions on education happening Sept. 24, 25 and 26 as part of Climate Week NYC. Say hi if you’re going, too.
• EARTHDAY.ORG, a nonprofit that supports environmental action worldwide, recently released a “School Guide to Climate Action.” On Oct. 9, in Washington, D.C., the group will hold a workshop for educators on the guide and climate instruction in schools. Email walker@earthday.org with questions or to sign up.
• A new World Bank report argues that climate action has been slow in part because people don’t have the necessary knowledge and skills. Policy makers need to invest in education as a tool for fighting climate change, it says.
• New research in the journal WIREs Climate Change examines the fossil fuel industry’s extensive involvement in higher education. Oil and gas companies and their affiliated foundations finance climate and energy research, sit on university governance boards and host student-recruitment events on campus, the report notes. 

What I’m reading

The Light Pirate, by Lily Brooks-Dalton. This novel tells the story of a family trying to survive in a Florida of the not-so-distant future that’s been ravaged by climate change. There’s an education angle: Storms and floods have driven away most residents of the fictional town of Rudder, including the only friend of 10-year-old Wanda, for whom school has become a hostile place. I found this book absolutely gutting but it also provides a glimpse of how people can persevere and even thrive in a world that looks very different from the one we’ve known.

Thanks for subscribing — and please let me know your thoughts on this newsletter and what you’d like to see me cover!

— Caroline Preston

This story about climate change classes was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the climate and education newsletter.

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MILWAUKEE — On a muggy afternoon in late June, about 20 kindergarten through second-grade teachers sat in a classroom on the third floor of Milwaukee’s North Division High School. The air conditioning wasn’t working properly, but the heat didn’t seem to bother the teachers, who were absorbed in a math lesson.

Danielle Robinson and Alicia Socha, two teachers in the district, led the lesson.

“I went to the store to buy some fruit. I bought five apples and four bananas. How many pieces of fruit did I buy?” Socha asked.

The elementary teachers in the room solved the problem quickly. But the solution wasn’t the point. The teachers spent more time discussing what type of problem this was. Describing and deconstructing it helped the teachers reach a deeper understanding of not only how it works but how to explain it to their youngest learners.

“Put yourself into the mind of a child,” Robinson said.

Teaching counting and basic arithmetic sounds like a simple task. But early-childhood and elementary teachers have the daunting task of introducing abstraction to their students: What is a number? What does it mean for a number to be bigger? What does it mean to be a part of a whole?

Across the hall, Beth Schefelker and Claire Madden, two other math education specialists, led a group of teachers and principals in adding fractions. Since 2022, the district has spent close to a million dollars in Covid-19 relief funds to pay the coaches, principals and teachers to attend these sessions.

Many of these teachers never saw themselves as “math people.” Today, they were surprising themselves. Kayla Thuemler, a first grade teacher, added some fractions using a number line, where fractions are visually arranged along a horizontal line, similar to using a ruler. Thuemler had never seen fractions taught using a number line. But seeing fractions with different denominators on the same number line helped her see fractions as a more coherent system.

“Why am I enjoying myself right now?” she asked colleagues. “I hate math.”

Melissa Hedges and DeAnn Huinker strolled back and forth between the two classrooms. They shared giddy glances when they saw the teachers get excited about math. Hedges oversees all things math for the Milwaukee district’s elementary and middle schools. Huinker, a professor who advised Hedges’ doctorate in math education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is a legend among Milwaukee’s math teachers.

Huinker led a math education revolution in the district when, between 2004 and 2014, almost every teacher in Milwaukee Public Schools received this type of training. Veteran teachers refer to this era as the golden years of math instruction. New district leaders abruptly ended that work. Ten years later, the teachers gathered on this balmy afternoon are the inheritors of Huinker’s legacy, tasked with preserving a vibrant culture of collaboration and a commitment to helping teachers master math.

“Every teacher wants to learn and do a better job teaching,” Huinker said. “When teachers are learning, students are learning.”

Related: Sign up for a limited-run newsletter that walks you through some of the most promising solutions for helping students conquer math.

Early in her career, Huinker dedicated herself to solving the problem of inequitable achievement in math, whether measured by test scores, grades or more qualitative surveys about students’ attitudes toward the subject. In the early 2000s, she saw a grant from the National Science Foundation as a possible solution for Milwaukee’s public schools.

The NSF, an independent federal agency, offers funding for math, science and engineering education in all 50 states. In 2003, the NSF awarded Huinker $20 million, the largest amount ever awarded to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, to establish a partnership between the university and the local school district.

 Huinker’s proposal was to have math education experts teach teachers more math while getting constant feedback from teachers on obstacles in the classroom. In 2002, a coalition of teachers, professors and administrators led by Huinker announced the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnership.

“It’s like all the stars aligned,” she said. “You had the university professors from education and mathematics, as well as the Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent, who was very supportive.”

The $20 million allowed the district to hire 120 math teacher leaders who would serve as a crucial piece to the system Huinker had imagined. Each of the 120 schools had a teacher leader, who would serve as the liaison between Huinker and her university colleagues and the classroom teachers across the district.

Beth Schefelker was one of those teacher leaders. She was “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed” about the partnership when it started, but she said she quickly ran into roadblocks. While some district administrators were on board, others were less enthused.

Schefelker recalled one meeting with a principal who leaned back in his chair, put his feet up on the desk and said, “Convince me why I need to be a part of this.” Another principal told her, “You’re just another woman asking me to take a leap of faith.”

Schefelker responded, “What we’re doing is not working.”

Before the partnership, the district’s approach to math resembled what math instruction looks like today in many schools across the nation — a patchwork of different methods and approaches. The partnership sought to bring more consistency among educators in a way that reflected the conceptual cohesion of mathematics as a discipline. But none of this would be possible if teachers themselves didn’t understand the math.

While teacher leaders like Schefelker worked in individual schools and Huinker managed the partnership from the university, Henry Kranendonk mediated from the district office. He helped develop a “spectrum” that became the centerpiece of the program.

First, the district’s teachers agreed what students in each grade should learn in math and made sure these learning goals met state standards. Second, teachers and university professors helped develop standardized assessments for each grade level. Teachers within individual schools would then meet to discuss where students were weak and report these findings to Huinker and her colleagues, who would then develop teacher training sessions.

“At the end of the day, it was gratifying,” Kranendonk said. “We weren’t giving them orders. We were collectively trying to figure out the best form of instruction.”

In the classroom, teachers pushed students to reach a conceptual understanding of mathematics, a departure from the “drill and kill” methods of timed tests and memorizing procedures. The goal was to help students understand how different topics within math, everything from whole numbers and fractions to algebraic functions and areas of shapes, are interconnected. Students could then confidently solve unfamiliar problems without relying on formulas or by following the same step-by-step procedures. They would understand that individual problems are just expressions of concepts.

Related: Kindergarten math is often too basic. Here’s why that’s a problem

The partnership also gave teachers a say in how the district taught math. The training sessions went over state standards in detail and helped teachers unlearn their own bad math habits, while dispelling any false ideas a teacher might have about not being a “math person.” The training sessions were designed and improved based on the feedback classroom teachers gave to Kranendonk.

Through this ecosystem, teachers discovered just how fragmented math instruction had been in the district. For example, they realized early on that some students didn’t understand the “equals” sign. Schefelker recalled how some students thought the symbol stood for “the answer is” rather than a symbol that represents balance. They had seen the equal sign only in the context of solving problems, and not as one critical component of the language of math.

“The kids didn’t understand equality,” Schefelker said. “All they were doing was going through the process and not really understanding what they were doing.”

Once Huinker and her colleagues intervened through training sessions, teachers started to teach the equal sign differently, using problems like “5+7=__+6” to show how both sides of the equation need to be the same value.

Once the partnership gained momentum, the benefits became obvious, especially in test score data. According to one University of Wisconsin report, test scores rose by 10 percentage points for some groups. According to a report by Huinker’s team in 2011, one school in the district, 98 percent of whose students lived in low-income households, increased its mathematics proficiency by 40 percentage points. Milwaukee Public Schools became a beacon for math instruction across the country.

A long-term look at the data, however, paints a more complicated picture. In 2004, when the partnership fully launched, about 30 percent of the district’s eighth graders were either proficient or advanced in math, according to Wisconsin standardized test score data. But in the 2005-06 school year, the state created a new standardized test, and scores plummeted for students: That year, only about 10 percent of eighth graders in Milwaukee were either proficient or advanced. That rate for eighth graders peaked in 2012, with about 16 percent reaching proficiency or advanced status. During the partnership, fourth graders saw about an 8 percentage point gain in the rate of students who scored proficient or advanced.

According to Huinker and Schefelker, however, test scores were only the most public-facing sign of improvement. Grades, student interest and teacher satisfaction skyrocketed during those years.

Buy-in from teachers was one reason the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnership worked, Huinker said. The second reason for the partnership’s success was more bureaucratic. Huinker, not the district, controlled the purse strings. Leaders at financially strapped districts like Milwaukee Public Schools constantly juggle competing priorities, and, according to Huinker and Kranendonk, district leaders were tempted to allocate some of the money to other areas of need. Huinker ensured that the money would be spent only on math instruction.

“The external funding really gave us a leverage point,” Huinker said. “We were accountable to the National Science Foundation for keeping track of how the money was spent towards the clear goals of the project.”

All this created a tight accountability structure that allowed everyone involved to stay focused on the goal of improving math achievement in Milwaukee.

The NSF money lasted nearly a decade, and the successes continued. When the federal money ran out, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction funded the partnership for two years.

Despite receiving national and statewide praise, the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnership ended in 2014, when a new superintendent and curriculum director decided to terminate the district’s relationship with the University of Wisconsin.

Huinker, Kranendonk and Schefelker recalled that the new district officials wanted to have complete district control over math instruction. The end was sudden, a contrast to the amount of time that had been invested into making the partnership work.

“They broke it,” Schefelker said. “It took years of work to thread that needle. It took months to unravel.”

Related: Teachers conquering their math anxiety

Today, about 12 percent of students in the district, compared to 41 percent statewide, are proficient in math, according to standardized test score data. Wisconsin administers its state tests to students in grades three to eight and grade 10. Hedges, the current math curriculum director for the district who held several positions during the partnership, recalled a colleague who had once called math the “crown jewel” of Milwaukee Public Schools. “If you look at our test scores now, we might not be able to say that,” Hedges said.

After the partnership ended in 2014, standardized test scores in math continued to rise incrementally. From 2016 to 2019, overall math proficiency in Milwaukee rose about 1 percentage point, to reach 16.2 percent. Hedges said some teachers remained committed to the partnership’s methods.

“We had such a strong leadership base,” she said. When the partnership ended, “there were 120 math teacher leaders out in the district, and some of them went back into classrooms.”

Huinker continues to train teachers for the district. Since the partnership ended in 2014, district leadership changed again, and there’s been more openness to collaborating with the university. The sessions for early-childhood educators, which meet for four hours a day for about two weeks, include both lessons in math and open forums for teachers to air grievances. The format of these meetings reflect the structure of the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnership, with its focus on math content and fostering collaboration between teachers who need more help teaching math.

Today, Milwaukee Public Schools is reckoning with fiscal mismanagement, changes to leadership, clashes with the state and tension between administrators and teachers. On top of all that, the district will implement a new math curriculum across its schools this fall. Teachers feel unprepared and lament that they’ll only see it a week before the school year starts.

Although another systemic overhaul is unlikely in the near future, the people who were around during the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnership are trying to pass down everything they’ve learned to the next generation of educators. The focus on the youngest learners is encouraging for newer teachers who got into the profession partly to avoid math.

Danielle Robinson was one of the teachers in the district who helped lead the sessions for early-childhood teachers. She wasn’t around during the partnership, but she adheres to the same goals and methods. Her job, she said, is to translate research in education and childhood development for teachers.

“I felt like I never really learned math, until I was able to learn” from Huinker and Hedges, Robinson said. “I always thought that social studies and literacy were more of my thing. These ladies really did change my life.”

Phoebe Goebels contributed reporting for this story.

This story about teaching math was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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When people learn that I have a doctorate in educational psychology and quantitative methods, they often assume that I love math. And the truth is, I do now, although that wasn’t always the case.

Like many Black students, I faced challenges throughout my academic journey, with math tracking being the primary one. Despite high math scores in earlier grades and a passion for the subject, I was placed into lower-level math courses in middle school.

This experience happened more than two decades ago, but limited access to advanced and engaging math options is still a problem today, even for high-achieving Black and Latino students.

All students deserve to benefit from enriching math learning experiences and the promising future those experiences can unlock.

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.

When I was in elementary school, my father, a master carpenter and math enthusiast, played a significant role in shaping my love and curiosity for math. He believed that no concept was too complex to learn, and he used carpentry to help me understand the interconnectedness of math and the world around me.

I learned about fractions, angles, precision and spatial awareness using wooden blocks and puzzle pieces I helped my dad create. By the age of 11, I could read a floor plan and calculate the length of a diagonal roofline using the Pythagorean theorem.

My dad taught me that math makes the world better, and that learning math is key to understanding the world.

But in middle school, being tracked into lower-level courses contradicted my math identity and eroded my confidence to the point of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy: I became a lower-level math student, which marked the beginning of a full-blown math identity crisis.

Frequent learning disruptions — a result of the lower-level classes also being used for students with behavioral challenges — combined with a curriculum without meaningful content facilitated a swift shift in my relationship with math.

Tracking also limited my access to advanced high school courses such as statistics and calculus that would have further developed my math skills and opened up numerous postsecondary opportunities.

Sadly, I was learning to hate math, despite my early love for it.

The tracked classes did, however, improve my social skills and popularity. Through regular exchanges of humorous insults with fellow classmates on various topics — such as who was the least intelligent or most economically disadvantaged — I developed a well-curated arsenal of diss material.

The joke-telling also became a great defense mechanism against the stigma of having been placed in lower-level classes. So instead of practicing math during study hall, I worked on refining my repertoire of jokes. I didn’t learn much math, but I did learn how to be funny.

Related: Racial gaps in math have grown. Could detracking help?

Unfortunately, my story is far too common. Indeed, more than half of U.S. states have recognized that their traditional approaches, including placement policies and limited math course options, often advantage an elite few while overlooking the needs of the broader student population.

While a lack of resources in underserved schools is a real issue, the most damage to students’ math identities and success can be attributed to dated perspectives on the type of math courses that should be offered and systemic racism dictating who they should be offered to.

I was fortunate to discover applied statistics in graduate school. This discovery marked a pivotal turning point in my post-elementary school relationship with math, which had, up until then, been more a “situationship” — a noncommittal and sporadic interest driven by prerequisite requirements.

For the first time since learning with my dad, I was engaged and sufficiently challenged while learning mathematics. Unlike my previous math classes, the statistics courses weren’t focused on rote memorization or problems that lack any relevance to the real world.

And since earning my Ph.D., I’ve used these skills across various professional domains.

I’ve used structural equation modeling to predict STEM access for underserved students and to make recommendations to broaden pathways to STEM. As a United Way director of education, I used statistical methods, such as linear regression, to make investment and funding decisions. During my 2019 run for Congress, my statistical expertise proved invaluable in analyzing trends, guiding campaign messaging and optimizing resource allocation. I felt empowered like never before, having the ability to make more accurate interpretations and informed decisions.

I recently co-authored a report addressing the equity dimensions of math education, delving into past policies and emerging strategies to better engage and prepare students for college and career in a data-driven society.

The report sheds light on the need to enrich students’ math experiences with challenging and relevant content that offers opportunities for deeper learning. This content should provide pathways for students to make connections between theoretical concepts and practical solutions, such as building sustainable communities in underresourced regions.

The most valuable lesson I learned throughout this journey was the inextricable link between math identity and math experiences. In other words, when people say they don’t like math, they really mean that they didn’t like their experiences learning math.

Students learn more than just mathematics in math class; they are affirming their abilities and math identities and discovering that they can have a place in shaping an advanced technological society. We owe it to our students to ensure that they have better math learning experiences than those I received decades ago.

Melodie K. Baker is national policy director for Just Equations, a nonprofit organization reconceptualizing the role of math to ensure educational equity.

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Math education is living under a spell. Most classes and curricula operate under a pervasive and unspoken assumption; its benefits are widely accepted, but its flaws are all too hidden.

The assumption is that you learn math by solving strings of successively harder problems. At each stage, the teacher decides how hard to make the problems; that is, where to set the “difficulty dial.” The ideal is to gradually turn the difficulty dial from left to right, easy to hard, at just the right speed. For example:

There’s truth in this way of thinking, but when I start treating that slice as a whole loaf — when I catch myself thinking of where to set the difficulty dial as the only choice, or even the primary choice, that a math teacher faces — that’s when I slap my face, dump ice water on my head and write two crucial inequalities on my hand:

Focusing on “easy” vs. “difficult” can become a trap. The two appear to stand opposed, and so teachers can fall into the idea that we must pick one or the other.

But who really cares about “easy” and “difficult”? They are only proxies for two higher virtues, the actual qualities of successful instruction.

Related: Widen your perspective. Our free biweekly newsletter consults critical voices on innovation in education.

First, math class should be welcoming. Students need to feel comfortable in the intellectual work of mathematics. Teachers need to help them feel capable not just of solving an “easy” or dumbed down problem, but of tackling the real stuff.

Second, math class should be challenging. It should sharpen and deepen students’ thinking. They should master new skills and practice solving unfamiliar problems.

Unlike easy vs. difficult, welcoming and challenging aren’t opposites. We don’t need to choose between them. The best math instruction braids the two together, in puzzles that are clear yet subtle. A good math lesson, like a good sudoku, can welcome and challenge students simultaneously — welcome them by challenging them.

As a classroom teacher, one of my favorite instructional moves is “give me an example.” At any level of K-12 mathematics, it offers agency and freedom — and it’s easy to come up with such questions.

Asking such questions invites diverse responses. They’re hard to grade in a standardized, objective way. That’s why textbooks and question banks tend to steer clear of them — and that’s why teachers must not.

Mathematical truth may be black and white, but mathematical thinking is not. We need questions that draw out all the shades and hues of thought.

When I taught sixth grade, one of my students’ favorite activities was writing questions for each other. At the end of each unit, I’d designate two piles on my desk: one for straightforward practice questions (the kind easily placed on a difficulty dial) and one for novel problems or open-ended puzzles (including, but not limited to, “give me an example” questions).

Nothing is more welcoming, or more challenging, than the chance to welcome and challenge one another.

When I first taught high school precalculus, my students couldn’t make heads or tails of piecewise-defined functions. Then I lost a whole lesson to a ramble about federal income taxes — and saw their heads perking up after weeks spent slouched on their desks.

That led me to a suitably welcoming and challenging task: Design your own income tax system. Give a table of brackets and rates; give the tax bill for a specific worker in each bracket; and, trickiest of all, give the tax bill as a piecewise-defined function of income.

I’m not sure if the project was easier or more difficult than the exercises we’d been doing. But it excited them more, and pushed them harder. It welcomed and it challenged students.

Since then, projects have become a staple of my teaching — not as a replacement for quizzes and tests, but as a necessary complement.

Related: Why schools are teaching math word problems all wrong

Kids, being human, prefer easy tasks over difficult ones. When the homework is too difficult, they mutiny; when it’s too easy, they shrug and smile.

But on some deeper level, they don’t want math to be easy. They want it to be rewarding.

I saw this the first time I taught AP calculus. In precalculus the year before, my teaching had certainly not inspired them. But now, as 12th graders, they’d name-drop their math class in the hallway, as if they’d befriended a minor celebrity.

“Can’t talk, guys. I’ve got to do the calculus.” “Hey, have you started the calculus?” “Ugh, I was up so late last night doing calculus.”

I say this with affection, having written a book on the stuff, but calculus has little obvious appeal. It’s unnecessary for daily life and irrelevant to most professions.

Despite this, my students thirsted for it. For these kids in Oakland, calculus’s challenge wasn’t a turn-off. It was a badge of honor.

There’s no way to make calculus easy — but that doesn’t mean it can’t be welcoming.

Ben Orlin is a math teacher who can’t draw. He is the author of “Math with Bad Drawings” (2018), “Change Is the Only Constant” (2019), “Math Games with Bad Drawings” (2022) and, most recently, “Math for English Majors” (September 2024). He has previously taught middle and high school, and now teaches at Saint Paul College.

This story about teaching math was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.

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BROOKLYN, N.Y. — About one and a half years ago, Isaiah Hickerson woke up in the middle of the night having dreamt he was a coder.

The dream was totally random, as dreams so often are. He didn’t know a thing about coding.

He was 23, and though originally from California, he’d been living with his uncle in Miami. By day, he was answering phones in the grooming department at PetSmart. After hours, he was trying to figure out what to do with his life.

He’d tried social media. And he’d taken some community college classes in business and biology. He was lukewarm on both.

“I just felt empty,” Hickerson said. “I wanted to do something different, but I just didn’t know what it was. I didn’t have a passion for anything. And I didn’t know what passion felt like.”

He knows how far-fetched it sounds, but seeing himself coding in the dream changed him. Moments after he woke up, he was online trying to figure out what it all meant.

“I remember the whole entire thing and it’s crazy. I can’t make it up,” Hickerson said. “I literally got up right from there, 2 in the morning, probably 2:05. I remember the whole entire timeline because this is what shifted — my dream is what brought me here.”

By “here,” Hickerson means the Marcy Lab School in Brooklyn, New York, where he’s nearly finished with a one-year software engineering fellowship program. It’s not a college or a for-profit tech boot camp, but a nonprofit, tuition-free program designed to help students from historically underrepresented communities — like Hickerson, who is Black — get high-paying jobs in tech.

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Across the country, colleges and universities offer scores of programs designed to help students from underrepresented groups succeed in STEM education and prepare for tech careers. Far less common are independent nonprofits that focus on students who don’t have the resources to go to college, don’t want to go to college or don’t believe they can succeed in a demanding STEM program. These nonprofits offer short-term training programs, for free, and help with job placement.

Two prominent examples, on opposite coasts, are the Marcy Lab School and Hack the Hood, in Oakland, California. Hack the Hood conducts 12-week data science-training programs and has recently partnered with Laney College, a community college in Oakland, to offer students a certificate of achievement in data science.

Data from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics shows that Black and Latino people earn science and engineering bachelor’s degrees at a disproportionately low rate, are underrepresented in the college-educated STEM workforce and earn lower salaries in those jobs than their white and Asian peers.

Achieving better representation means finding ways to get students the academic and financial assistance they need. The financial resources needed for a four-year STEM degree — or even a two-year degree — can be prohibitive. Opening up shorter avenues that are free — or significantly less expensive than for-profit boot camps — can at least put students on the path toward a STEM career. Programs designed with these students in mind give them training so that they have a shot to compete for STEM jobs with salaries that can lead to economic and social mobility. (Both the Marcy Lab School and Hack the Hood are nonprofits funded by donations from philanthropic groups.)

Related: When universities slap their names on for-profit coding bootcamps

“STEM is a white, cis, heteronormative field,” Weverton Ataide Pinheiro, an assistant professor in the College of Education at Texas Tech University, said. “And these people are the only ones that are being able to get a slice of the pie. Actually, they’re eating the whole pie.”

For Ataide Pinheiro, these free alternative programs have value, regardless of whether they result in a college degree, if they allow people from historically marginalized groups to get just one step further than they would have gotten without the training.

“We are desperate to just try to support these folks because we know money matters,” Ataide Pinheiro said. “We know that they will only be able to compete if they have certain training, and they might not be able to pay [for it].”

Reuben Ogbonna, one of the Marcy Lab School’s co-founders, said his team has worked hard to establish partnerships with tech companies to get software engineering job opportunities for Marcy students when they finish the program. Ogbonna said a team of former educators and salespeople introduces Marcy to companies, hoping to convince them to consider Marcy students for roles that would typically require a bachelor’s degree.

To prevent Marcy students from being “met with a glass ceiling somewhere down the line” because of their nontraditional training, Ogbonna said that Marcy asks the companies to treat its students the way they’d treat anyone else in the job interview process so that they can prove their skills and show employers that they deserve equal treatment as they progress in their careers.

Since the Marcy Lab School opened in 2019, roughly 200 students have completed the program. In the first three years, about 80 percent of them graduated, and about 90 percent of those who graduated landed jobs in STEM with an average salary of $105,000 per year, according to Ogbonna. But in the past two years, during what Ogbonna called a tech recession, it’s been significantly more difficult for these students to get jobs. He said that this year, six months after graduating, about 60 percent of graduates had jobs.

Related: To attract more students to STEM fields in college, advocates urge starting in sixth grade

By pursuing an education at Marcy rather than attending a four-year college, students get three extra years to make money, build their savings and accrue wealth, Ogbonna said. And they won’t have student loans to pay off.

“We’re trying to reverse a really big problem that’s been around for a long time,” Ogbonna said. “And part of my theory of change is that if we can get wealth in the hands of our students earlier, it can come out exponentially for the communities that we’re serving.”

Both the Marcy Lab School and Hack the Hood also try to prepare students for what they might experience when they get into the workforce.

Hack the Hood serves students between the ages of 16 and 25 and, in addition to the technical curriculum, teaches students about racial equity, social justice issues and understanding their personal identities, said Samia Zuber, its executive director.

Zuber explained that these parts of the program help prepare students to confront issues such as imposter syndrome and to think critically about the work they are doing. For example, Zuber said, they teach students about racial bias in facial recognition software and the implications it can have for different communities.

This lesson was particularly striking for 24-year-old Lizbet Roblero Arreola, who recalled very little exposure to computer programming when she was in school.

“It really opens your eyes and makes you want to change it,” Roblero Arreola said, concerning the misuse of facial recognition data. “For me personally, I want to be somebody in those companies that doesn’t let that happen.”

For Roblero Arreola, a first-generation Mexican American, going to college was never a given. When she became pregnant with her first child shortly after graduating from high school, she decided to keep working in customer service jobs rather than go to college. Last year, after giving birth to her second child, she saw a friend post online about Hack the Hood. She’d been thinking about going back to school, and it seemed Hack the Hood could help ease her transition.

Roblero Arreola said that the Hack the Hood team supported her by helping her understand all the steps she would need to take to enroll at Laney College, including helping her figure out how to apply for financial aid. (Hack the Hood programs are tuition-free, but students who go on to pursue a certificate with Laney have to pay tuition there.)

After she finishes her associate degree in computer programming at Laney, she hopes to transfer to a four-year college and earn a bachelor’s degree. Eventually, she’d like to build a career in the cybersecurity field. She said she’s putting in the work now so that her children will have more opportunities than she did.

Related: Just 3% of scientists and engineers are Black or Latina women. Here’s what teachers are doing about it

These programs also serve students like Nicole Blanchette, an 18-year-old from a rural community in Connecticut, who chose Marcy Lab School over a traditional college experience.

Blanchette’s father has an associate degree, and her mother, who is Filipino, didn’t pursue postsecondary education. Blanchette always dreamed of going to college, and during her senior year of high school, she became intrigued by a career in tech. She hesitated, however, because “the stereotypical computer science student does not look like me.”

But an ad for Marcy Lab on Instagram made Blanchette think a tech career was possible.

She did the math and found that one year of living in New York would be cheaper than attending any of the colleges she’d gotten into, even with financial aid. She convinced her parents to spend the money they’d saved for her education on her living expenses while she attends Marcy.

Ogbonna and Marcy Lab’s other co-founder, Maya Bhattacharjee-Marcantonio, both started out as teachers and recruited the first class of Marcy students from their personal networks and from community organizations in Brooklyn.

Now, roughly 30 to 40 percent of Marcy Lab’s students are coming straight out of high school. Ogbonna said that for some of these students, “academic, economic and social barriers prevent them from being able to access a college that they can verify has strong outcomes.” They often believe they can’t afford any wrong turns. And for those who’ve already had some college, there’s often urgency to get a job because they need to pay back student loans or contribute financially to their households.

“Some of them were thinking about going to the short-term, very expensive coding boot camps,” Ogbunna said, and see a tuition-free program like Marcy Lab as “a less risky option.”

After feeling directionless and uninspired, Hickerson, who first thought about a career in coding after that vivid dream, now says he loves learning, and complex problem-solving tech challenges only make him want to learn more.

Before he started learning to code, he said he never knew what it felt like to be passionate about something. Now, when he talks about coding, what he’s learning in school and the career he hopes to build in software engineering, he doesn’t seem to ever stop smiling.

This story about STEM education programs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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The U.S. currently does not have enough scientists to compete as a global leader in emerging high-tech fields.

Despite our national deficit in scientists, less than 30 percent of professors in STEM fields in the U.S. are women, even though women earn 40 percent of all doctorates in science, technology, engineering and math.

Each year, the federal government budgets billions of dollars for research and development, and gives much of the money to universities and research laboratories that train and support STEM researchers.

That funding is the lifeblood of scientific discovery, and it is imperative that the federal government demand more from institutions that are pushing women out of the sciences.

Many of the women who earn STEM degrees trickle out of academia after receiving years of government investment in their specialized training. Many leave mid-career, when they are at their technical peak for producing breakthrough research.

With a few small changes, we can provide adequate support for women in the sciences — and boost long-term scientific achievement.

We might then see an explosion in original thought and discovery at universities, and ultimately, a greater return on taxpayer money — a winning proposition for everyone.

Related: Interested in innovations in the field of higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly Higher Education newsletter.

Historically, some of the greatest scientific innovations and technologies were developed with the support of government research funds, from artificial intelligence to diabetes treatments and the detection of gravitational waves.

Over the last 40 years, we’ve made tremendous progress in welcoming more women into STEM at a young age. In many fields women now outnumber men in undergraduate and graduate programs.

Yet as women progress in academia, they are often asked to carry a heavier workload than their male colleagues in terms of committee service, departmental service and mentoring duties. They also carry a heavier load in terms of care for family members and young children because they have to.

These extra duties, whether seen or unseen, coupled with subjective assessment criteria like “fit within the department,” make it harder for women to make the case for tenure and promotion.

Not surprisingly, only 44 percent of female tenured professors are mothers, while 70 percent of male tenured professors are fathers. And women professors, especially women of color, are still underpaid relative to their male colleagues with similar publication records.

Clearly, the vestiges of academia’s sexist history still haunt us. The most common reasons women leave academia are because of harsh workplace climates riddled with harassment, sexual assault, discrimination and dysfunctional leadership.

Workplaces in the nonprofit research sector tend to be more hospitable places for women, with organizations like Howard Hughes Medical Institute, for example, offering affordable child care and pre-K education. The share of public academic institutions offering child care services declined by 14 percent from 2004 to 2019. Colleges aren’t doing enough.

Similarly, unlike most business entities in the U.S., universities are seldom accountable for the actions of their employees. In the very setting where harassment is most harmful — the education of young people — harassers face few consequences.

The result of all this: incredibly talented and capable women are being pushed out of academia.

Take one example: Katalin Karikó, the 2023 Nobel Prize laureate in medicine. When the world was scrambling to discover a remedy for Covid, it was her research that enabled the creation of mRNA vaccines against the virus.

By the time she received the recognition she deserved, however, after years of rejection from funders, journals and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, Kariko had moved into the private sector.

My own journey in scientific research began as a participant at SSP, a summer science enrichment program for high school students run by a nonprofit organization. I worked as a NASA-funded researcher for 10 years before becoming a professor at Brown University. I eventually stepped away from academia because it was not a supportive arena for doing what I love: scientific research and mentoring young people.

I have since found opportunities to continue these activities with supportive and caring colleagues at SSP, where I now serve as chief academic officer.

There is a lot that universities can do to improve working conditions for women. These changes include equally sharing departmental service loads, providing onsite, university-operated day care and preschools and creating formal and standardized policies for spousal and partner hires and leave for family care or the arrival of a new child.

Related: STUDENT VOICES: We need more women in STEM fields, and we have ideas for making that happen

These changes must be enacted alongside a shared understanding that such policies should be available to all and are integral to maintaining the equity that universities claim to seek.

Government funders of academia, like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and NASA, wishing to make serious progress in equity and inclusion, could withhold grants to universities that refuse to engage in these simple measures — especially those that protect professors with a proven track record of abuse and sexual harassment. Congress should provide additional support.

Universities need to know that they must do a better job in equity or risk losing federal funding.

This is ultimately a question of good finances and good science. Either we invest in our best or we force them out.

At SSP, I aim to equip the strong, bright, motivated high school teens I mentor with all the skills they will need to thrive in academia and achieve their career goals. I hope that the university and grant systems will enact changes to make the academic landscape more hospitable to these students, allowing their creativity, talents, interests and contributions to support the greater good.

We should not suppress half of the intellectual talent of our nation. Women must be supported. We cannot afford not to.

Amy Barr Mlinar is a planetary scientist and chief academic officer of SSP International.

This story about women and STEM was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our Higher Education newsletter.

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ALBANY, Ore. – It’s 7:15 on a cold gray Monday morning in May at Linn-Benton Community College in northwestern Oregon. Math professor Michael Lopez, in a hoodie and jeans, a tape measure on his belt, paces in front of the 14 students in his “math for welders” class. “I’m your OSHA inspector,” he says. “Three sixteenths of an inch difference, you’re in violation. You’re going to get a fine.”

He’s just given them a project they might have to do on the job: figure out the rung spacing on an external steel ladder that attaches to a wall. Thousands of dollars are at stake in such builds, and they’re complicated: Some clients want the fewest possible rungs to save money, others a specific distance between steps. To pass inspection, rungs must be evenly spaced to within one sixteenth of an inch, the top rung exactly flush with the top of the wall.

The exercise could be an algebra problem, but Lopez gives them a six-step algorithm that doesn’t use algebraic letters and symbols. Instead, they get real-world industry variables: tolerances, basic rung spacing, wall height.

Lopez breaks the class into five teams. Each team is assigned different wall heights and client specs, and they get to work calculating where to place the rungs. Lopez will inspect each team’s work and pass or fail the job.

Math is a giant hurdle for most community college students pursuing welding and other career and technical degrees. About a dozen years ago, Linn-Benton’s administration looked at their data and found that many students in career and technical education, or CTE, were getting most of the way toward a degree but were stopped by a math course, said the college’s president, Lisa Avery. That’s not unusual: Up to 60 percent of students entering community college are unprepared for college-level work, and the subject they most often need help with is math.

The college asked the math department to design courses tailored to those students, starting with its welding, culinary arts and criminal justice programs. The first of those, math for welders, rolled out in 2013.

More than a decade later, welding department instructors say that math for welders has had a huge impact on student performance. Since 2017, 93 percent of students taking it have passed, and 83 percent have achieved all the course’s learning goals, including the ability to use arithmetic, geometry, algebra and trigonometry to solve welding problems, school data show. Two years ago, Linn-Benton asked Lopez to design a similar course for its automotive technology program; they began to offer that course last fall.

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Math for welders changed student Zane Azmane’s view of what he could do. “I absolutely hated math in high school. It didn’t apply to anything I needed at the moment,” said Azmane, 20, who failed several semesters of math early in high school but last year got a B in the Linn-Benton course. “We actually learned equations I’m going to use, like setting ladder rungs,” he said.

Linn-Benton’s aim is to change how students pursuing technical degrees learn math by making it directly applicable to their technical specialties.

Some researchers think these small-scale efforts to teach math in context could transform how it’s taught more broadly.

Among strategies to help college students who struggle with math, giving them contextual curriculums seems to have “the strongest theoretical base and perhaps the strongest empirical support,” according to a 2011 paper by Columbia University Teachers College professor emerita Dolores Perin. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

Perin’s paper echoed the results of a 2006 study of math in CTE involving 131 CTE high school teachers and almost 3,000 students. Students in the study who were taught math through an applied approach performed significantly better on two of three standardized tests than those taught math in a more traditional way. (The applied math students also performed better on the third test, though the results didn’t reach the statistical significance threshold.)

So far, there haven’t been systematic studies of math in CTE at the college level, said James Stone, director of the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education at the Southern Regional Education Board, who ran the 2006 study.

Stone explained how math in context works. Students start with a practical problem and learn a math principle for solving it. Next, they use the principle to solve a similar practical problem, to see that it applies generally. Finally, they apply the principle on paper, in say, a standardized test.

“I like to say math is just like a wrench: It’s another tool in the toolbox to solve a workplace problem,” said Stone. “People learn almost anything better in context because then it has meaning.”

Linn-Benton dean Steve Schilling offers an example. Carpenters use a well-known 3-4-5 rule to get a square corner — lay out two boards at a square angle and mark one board at 3 feet and the other at 4 feet. Now a straight line joining the two marks should measure exactly 5 feet—if it doesn’t, the boards are out of square.

The rule is based on the Pythagorean theorem, a method for calculating the lengths of a right triangle’s sides: a² + b² = c². When explaining to students why the theorem describes the rule, the instructor uses math terms — “adjacent side,” “opposite side,” “hypotenuse” — that they’ll need to use on a math test, said Schilling. When using practical skills like the 3-4-5 rule on a project, “at first, they don’t even realize they’re doing math,” he said.

Related: Federal relief money boosted community colleges, but now it’s going away

Oregon appears to be one of the few places where this approach is spreading, if slowly.

Three hours south of Linn-Benton, Doug Gardner, an instructor in the Rogue Community College math department, had long struggled with a persistent question from students: “Why do we need to know this?” The answer couldn’t just be that they needed it for their next, higher-level math class, said Gardner, now the department’s chair. “It became my life’s work to have an answer to that question.”

Meanwhile, Algebra I was a huge barrier for many Rogue students. About a third of those taking the course or a lower-level math course failed or withdrew. That meant they had to retake the class and likely stay another term to graduate; since many were older students with families and obligations, hundreds dropped out, school administrators said.

For those who stayed, lack of math knowledge hurt their job skills. Pipe fitters, for example, are among the higher-paid welders, said welding department chair Todd Giesbrecht, but they need a solid understanding of the math involved. “Whether they’re making elbows, whether they’re making dump truck bodies, they’re installing steam pipe, all of those things involve math,” he said.

So, in 2010, Gardner applied for and got a National Science Foundation grant to create two new applied algebra courses. Instead of abstract formulas, students would learn practical ones: how to calculate the volume of a wheelbarrow of gravel and the number of wheelbarrows needed to cover an area, or how much a beam of a certain size and type will bend under a certain load.

Since then, the pass rate in the applied algebra class has averaged 73 percent while that of the traditional course has continued to hover around 59 percent, according to Gardner. Even modest gains like that are hard to achieve, said Navarro Chandler, a dean at the college. “Any move over 2 percent, we call that a win,” he said.

One day in May, math professor Kathleen Foster was teaching applied algebra in a sun-drenched classroom on Rogue’s wooded campus and launched into a lesson about the Pythagorean theorem and why it’s an essential tool for building home interiors and steel structures.

She presented the formula, then jumped to illustrated exercises: What’s the right length for diagonal braces in a lookout tower to ensure that the structure will hold? What length does the diagonal top plate for a stair wall need to be to ensure that the wall’s corners are perfectly square?

James Butler-Kyniston, 30, who is pursuing a degree as a machinist, said that the exercises covered in Foster’s class are directly applicable to his future career. One exercise had them calculate how large a metal sheet you would need to manufacture a certain number of parts at one time, a skill he’s used in the lab. “Algebraic formulas apply to a lot of things, but since you don’t have any examples to tie them to, you end up thinking they’re useless,” he said.

Related: Proof Points: Shop class sometimes boosts college going, Massachusetts study finds

Unlike at Linn-Benton, students at Rogue in any degree field can take this course, so some of the applied examples don’t work for everyone. Butler-Kyniston said he thinks applied math works better if it’s tailored to a specific set of majors.

Still, Foster’s class could rescue the college plans of at least one student. Kayla LeMaster, 41, is on her second try at a two-year degree. She had to drop out in 2012 after getting injured in a house fire. She’s going for a degree that will let her transfer to the University of Oregon to major in psychology; she hopes to eventually work as a school counselor or in some other job supporting kids.

But her graduation from Rogue hangs by a thread because she needs a math credit. She struggled in the traditional algebra class and had to withdraw, and the same happened in a statistics course. Applied algebra is her last chance. “When you add the alphabet to math, it doesn’t make sense,” she said. By contrast, in the examples in Foster’s class, “you get into that work mode, a job site somewhere, and you can see the problem in your head.” She got an A on her first test. “I’m getting it,” she said.

Gardner worries about the consequences of the traditional abstract approach to teaching math. When he was in college, “nobody ever showed me one formula that calculated anything really interesting,” he said. “I just think we’re doing a terrible job. Applied math is so fun.”

Oregon’s leaders appear to see merit in teaching math in context. In 2021, state legislators passed a law requiring all four-year colleges to accept an applied math community-college course called Math in Society as satisfying the math requirement for a four-year degree. In that course, instead of studying theoretical algebra, students learn how to use probability and statistics to interpret the results in scientific papers and how political rules like apportionment and gerrymandering affect elections, said Kathy Smith, a math professor at Central Oregon Community College.

“If I had my way, this is how algebra would be taught to every student, the applied version,” said Gardner. “And then if a student says, ‘This is great, but I want to go further,’ then you sign up for the theoretical version.”

At the level of individual schools, lack of money and time constrain the spread of applied math. Stone’s team works with high schools around the country to design contextual math courses for career and technical students. They tried to work with a few community colleges, but their CTE faculty, many of whom are part-timers on contract, didn’t have time to partner with their math departments to come up with a new curriculum, a yearlong process, Stone said.

Linn-Benton was able to invest the time and money because its math department was big enough to take on the task, said Avery. And both Linn-Benton and Rogue may be outliers because they have math faculty with technical backgrounds: Lopez worked as a carpenter and sheriff’s deputy and served three tours as a machine gunner in Iraq, and Gardner was a construction contractor who still designs houses. “I have up to 16 house plans in the works during construction season,” he said.

Back in Lopez’s class, on a sunny Wednesday, students are done calculating where their ladder rungs should go and now must mark them on the wall. One team struggles. “I don’t understand any of this,” says Keith Perkins, 40, who’s going for a welding degree and wants to get into the local pipe fitters union.

“I know, but you’re not doing the steps in the right order,” says Lopez. “Walk me through it. Tell me what you did, starting with step 1.”

As teams finish up, Lopez inspects their work. “That’s one thirty-second shy. But I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” he tells one group. “OSHA’s not going to knock you down for that.”

Three teams pass, two fail — but this is the place to make mistakes, not out on the job, Lopez tells them.

“This stuff is hard,” said Perkins. “I hated math in school. Still hate it. But we use it every day.”

This story about math in CTE courses was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — As their teacher pounded his drums, belting the lyrics to the Native folk rock song “NDN Kars,” middle schoolers Eli, Izzy and Manin rehearsed new guitar chords for an upcoming performance.

“I got a sticker that says ‘Indian Power,’” teacher Luke Cordova sang. “I stuck it on my bumper. That’s what holds my car together.”

Inside a neighboring greenhouse, a group of school staff and volunteers prepared to harvest herbs and vegetables for students to use in medicinal teas and recipes during science lessons on local ecology. Meanwhile, in a 19th century schoolhouse next door, eighth graders in a Native literature class debated the consequences of racism on college campuses. “Remember,” teacher Morgan Barraza (Akimel O’odham, Kawaika, Apache, Thai) told them, “power is not all with the decision makers. You as a community have power, too.”

Once the site of an Indian boarding school, where the federal government attempted to strip children of their tribal identity, the Native American Community Academy now offers the opposite: a public education designed to affirm and draw from each student’s traditional culture and language.

The charter school, NACA, opened its doors in 2006. Today, it enrolls roughly 500 students from 60 different tribes in grades K-12, bolstering their Indigenous heritage with land-based lessons and language courses built into a college preparatory model. High schoolers at NACA graduate at much higher rates and tend to outperform their peers in Albuquerque Public Schools — which authorizes the charter — and throughout New Mexico. Over the past decade, NACA’s academic track record and reputation with families and tribal leaders has spurred the creation of a network of schools designed to overhaul education for Native students across the American West.

At 13 campuses in five states, the NACA Inspired Schools Network supports tribal communities that have found little support in traditional K-12 systems and want academic alternatives that reflect their hopes and expectations for the next generation. Each school approaches that mission very differently, and with varying results. Some have struggled to keep their doors open, testing the Albuquerque-based network’s ability to sustain its success beyond the flagship school. Still, network leaders plan to continue expanding and hope to present the NACA model as a way to grant Indigenous families the self-determination and sovereignty that has been denied to them for generations.

“In 150 years, we moved from a foreign, abusive, violent structure to now, where maybe our communities have something to say about where education is going,” said Anpao Duta Flying Earth (Lakota, Dakota, Ojibwe, Akimel O’odham), the network’s executive director. “We’re leading these schools. We’re in the classrooms. It’s not just maintaining status quo. It’s how we’re pushing the edge of what’s possible.”

Related: 3 Native American women head to college in the pandemic. Will they get a sophomore year?

NACA was born out of an urgent need to reimagine education for Indigenous youth: In 2005, 

three quarters of Native American students graduated on time in the Albuquerque school district, compared to 87 percent of all students, according to state data. Only about 1 in 4 students identifying as American Indian tested proficient in math, while proficiency rates in reading and science hovered closer to 40 percent. A string of suicides in the city’s Native communities, especially among youth, shocked educators.

In response, Native administrators within the district started meeting with families, college graduates and tribal leaders to discuss what a better education for Native students might look like. More than 200 people weighed in, often sharing their poor experiences in traditional schools, such as pervasively low expectations and a lack of cultural awareness among teachers. Community members prioritized three things in their dream school for Native youth: secure cultural identities, college preparation and holistic wellness.

Those conversations prompted Albuquerque Public Schools to authorize NACA as its first charter. Today, courses at all grade levels include Indigenous history, numeracy, land-based science and language classes in Keres, Lakota, Navajo, Tiwa, Spanish and Zuni. About two-thirds of the school’s teachers are Native American, with many alumni now leading classrooms. 

NACA requires students to take at least two college-level courses and earn internship credit. Last year, nearly 80 percent of graduates enrolled in college, up from 65 percent for the class of 2022. The school also tracks college completion rates, with 59 percent of the class of 2012 finishing within six years. Since then, the numbers have slipped to the single digits, with just 5 percent of the class of 2016 finishing within six years, according to a data analysis from the charter school network. (School officials said the decline is due to incomplete data.)

Younger students attend the K-8 campus on the former boarding school site, while the high school is located in a gleaming new tower nearby at the Central New Mexico College.

During a lunch break, 11th graders Joshua, a Navajo Nation citizen, and Tyshawn, from the Laguna Pueblo, volleyed a badminton birdie under the tower’s shadow. Both are recent transfers to NACA — Tyshawn from a private Catholic school and Joshua from a traditional public high school.

“There was nothing like this. No language class, nothing,” Joshua said of his previous school. Discussions of tribal culture were limited to a few isolated craft projects during a history unit and inaccurate portrayals of Indians at the “First Thanksgiving,” he recalled.

“Yeah, not at my school,” Tyshawn agreed, chuckling. “You had to learn that experience yourself.”

“I was the ‘only’ a lot,” added Joshua, referring to his Native identity. “We fill an entire school here.”

Related: Schools bar Native students from wearing traditional regalia at graduation

It’s only recently that the U.S. has fully acknowledged its long history of using education as a weapon against tribes. An investigative report released by the U.S. Department of the Interior in May 2022 identified more than 400 Indian boarding schools, across dozens of states and former territories, as part of a system that directly targeted children “in the pursuit of a policy of cultural assimilation.”

The investigation found evidence of at least 53 burial sites for children. Schools renamed students with English names, cut their hair and punished them — through solitary confinement, flogging and withholding food — for speaking Native languages or practicing their traditional religions. Manual labor was a predominant part of school curricula, but often left graduates with few employable skills.

“We continue to see the evidence of this attempt to forcibly assimilate Indigenous people in the disparities that communities face,” U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, said at the time of the report’s release.

According to a 2019 national survey, close to half of American Indian and Alaska Native students reported knowing “nothing” or only “a little” about their cultural heritage. A majority — between 83 percent and 91 percent — of fourth and eighth graders in the survey said they could not speak or read in their heritage language, or reported knowing a few words or phrases at most. Other studies have found significantly higher child poverty rates, lower graduation rates and lower performance on standardized exams for Native students.

As the state of education for these children continued to languish, the U.S. Department of Education in 2018 pushed for the expansion of high-quality charter schools meant to serve Native communities, among other groups it deemed educationally disadvantaged and underserved by the existing charter sector. It later published, in partnership with the National Indian Education Association, a guide to help founders and supporters of new Native American charter schools.

“The word just hasn’t gotten out about the ability to do this,” said Todd Ziebarth, a senior vice president of state advocacy and support at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

In its tally of about 4,300 charter schools with at least one Native American student, the Alliance counts at least 16 schools specifically dedicated to Native American cultural affirmation. Only a handful offer classes taught in an Indigenous language.

Related: College tuition breaks for Indigenous students spread, but some tribes are left out

In one of those schools, about 90 miles northeast of Albuquerque, a dozen students walked into the front office of Kha’p’o Community School with stacks of books teetering in their hands.

They’d just cleaned the shelves at the Santa Clara Pueblo library, grabbing their favorite titles in Tewa, one of the languages spoken by the Pueblo people in New Mexico. The third graders juggled the books as they traversed a courtyard ringed by adobe houses-turned-classrooms, with teacher Paul Chavarria trailing them.

Back in their classroom, Chavarria, a first-year Tewa language teacher at Kha’p’o, commenced a lesson on the language. It’s a traditionally oral language, and speakers frown on any written form. Chavarria, though, scribbled a rough translation for “stone,” “trees” and “plants” on a whiteboard to help the students learn their heritage language.

For decades, the school (then known as Santa Clara Day School) was run by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Education, or BIE, which today operates 183 schools on 64 reservations. But in 2014, after the government-appointed principal barred a Tewa teacher from campus, tribal leaders took control of the school from the federal government, said Porter Swentzell, the school’s executive director and an enrolled member of the Pueblo. That same year, the school officially joined the NACA-inspired network as a K-6 charter school with a dual language immersion model. Today, it enrolls about 90 students. 

“In our hands, language is a sacred obligation. Our job is bigger than math or ELA,” Swentzell said.. “Our story doesn’t begin with us, and it certainly won’t end with us.”

Swentzell, who served on the school board when it shifted to tribal control, recalled a rocky start for Kha’p’o. The BIE withdrew the bulk of its support, he said. Teachers and staff had to reapply for their jobs, which no longer offered salaries at the federal level. In terms of school policies, technology systems, contracts and more, “we were starting from scratch,” Swentzell said.

Then, during the pandemic, Kha’p’o’s principal left, and enrollment plummeted from 120 students to 73, as multigenerational households kept their children at home. Half of the school’s teaching positions were unfilled, largely because of its remote location and lower salaries, according to Swentzell, who took over as head of school in 2022. 

Kha’p’o wasn’t the only school in the network to lose its leader during the pandemic. And each has since struggled to get academics and operations back on track, said Flying Earth, head of the charter network. The network has tried to help: In 2022, it created a fellowship program to nurture new leaders like Swentzell, a former professor at the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. The fellows meet regularly on Zoom and gather in person once a year, along with a lead teacher or executive team member who could potentially become principal one day.

Related: How one Minneapolis university more than doubled its Native student graduation rate

Indeed, as the network has grown, it has confronted the difficulty of recreating the “NACA sauce” — as the flagship’s principal called it — in each new tribal community.

Six Directions Indigenous School opened the same year as Kha’p’o, in the western region of the state near the Navajo Nation and Zuni Reservation. Data from the New Mexico Public Education Department shows that 1 in 5 students at the charter school tested proficient in science. About 1 in 10 students perform on grade level in math, with a slightly better rate in reading, at 14 percent. 

Aside from academic problems, students at Six Directions have protested what they view as the school’s failure to fulfill its charter of serving Native youth. “It’s right there on all the signs: ‘This is an Indigenous school,’” said Caleb, a 14-year-old Hopi freshman. “This is supposed to be an opportunity for us to know our culture. These teachers weren’t doing that.”

At the start of the school year, in August, Caleb and other high schoolers at the K-12 campus staged an impromptu walkout to protest what they described as a revolving door of teachers hired from overseas and ongoing vacancies for language and culture classes. As of late fall, the entire school had just one core teacher, in science.

The walkout happened during Rebecca Niiha’s first week on the job as new head administrator of Six Directions. A former teacher who has worked on the Zuni and Navajo reservations, Niiha, who is Hopi, had admired Six Directions from afar. But she described finding its academic achievement and school climate as “degenerative” on day one.

After the walkout, two more teachers quit. Then the school’s current landlord announced it planned to sell the property, leaving Niiha unsure if she’d have to find a new location. In January, Six Directions received a warning from the state about its poor performance. 

The network’s support of struggling schools, like Six Directions, can only go so far. It does not directly authorize any charter and has limited ability to hold the schools accountable. 

Still, the network dispatches experts on finance, community engagement, student experience, curriculum and professional development. On a weekday last year, a team from the network met with Niiha to discuss options for the school’s location, training for teachers and an upcoming charter reauthorization. The network also recently partnered with AmeriCorps to place Indigenous educators in schools to offer classroom support, tutoring and mentoring, and has worked with individual tribes to certify teachers in heritage languages.

“Once a school’s created, we’re in it for the long haul together,” said Ben Calabaza, Kewa – Santa Domingo Pueblo and a spokesperson for the charter network.

Ultimately, the network wants to avoid being forced to close another of its member schools, as happened last year when Denver Public Schools shuttered the American Indian Academy. That school opened in fall 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and suffered from low enrollment and poor finances, according to the charter’s board of directors.

Flying Earth acknowledged the challenges of running a charter network that spans schools in several states. He said the charter model isn’t, on its own, a solution for poor educational outcomes for Native students. But he added that the NACA-inspired network has done what it promised: offered tribal communities a chance to have agency in building a dream school for their Native youth.

“How do we use the structures of education today, including charter schools, to lift up the genius that’s always been there, since time immemorial?” Flying Earth said, referring to the “genius” of traditional ways of knowing in Native communities. “The namesake school of NACA serves as an example of how one community did it.”

Many students, long after graduation, continue to contribute to that community. Some have returned as teachers and school staff. Emmet Yepa Jr., Jemez Pueblo, commuted two hours each way to attend NACA in downtown Albuquerque when he was in high school. Now, at 30, he sings every year at the school’s annual feast day — a traditional celebration among New Mexico pueblos.

“What attracted me to NACA was just the community,” he said. “They really emphasize your culture and holistic wellbeing.”

Yepa earned a Grammy Award as a child and later graduated from NACA as part of its inaugural class in 2012. From there, he went on to the University of New Mexico and now works for an Albuquerque nonprofit that includes land-based and outdoor education in civic leadership programs for young people.

Based on his positive experience, his siblings enrolled at NACA. His younger sister graduated  last year and now attends UNM, while his younger brother is a sixth grader.

“It’s hard to get into NACA now because there’s a waiting list,” Yepa said. “Thankfully he got a spot.”

This story about NACA schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, in partnership with ICT, formerly Indian Country Today. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Native Americans turn to charter schools to reclaim their kids’ education appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Before she got to the math in her lesson on linear equations last fall, Sydney Kealanahele asked her class of eighth graders on Oahu why kalo, or taro root, is so important in Hawaii.* What do you know about kalo, she asked them. Have you ever picked it?

A boy who had never spoken in class, and never seemed even slightly interested in math, raised his hand.

“He said, ‘I pick kalo with my grandma. She has a farm,’” Kealanahele recalled. “He was excited to tell us about that.”

Class discussion got animated. Everybody knew about poi, the creamy staple Hawaiian food made from mashed taro. Others had even noticed that there were fewer taro farms on Oahu.

That’s when Kealanahele guided the conversation to the whiteboard, plotting data on pounds of taro produced over time on a graph, which created a perfect descending line. The class talked about why there is less taro production, which led to a discussion about the shortage of farm labor.

Kealanahele had taught eighth-grade math for six years at a campus of the Kamehameha Schools, but this was the first time she had started a lesson with a conversation about farming. The idea came from professional development she’d just completed, in ethnomathematics, an approach that connects math to culture by embedding math in a story about something relevant to students’ lives.

Ethnomathematics isn’t new, but until recently it was limited to a niche area of educational and anthropological research on how different cultures use math. Over the past couple of decades, it has evolved into one of several efforts to create more engaging and inclusive math classrooms, particularly for Black, Hispanic and Indigenous students, who tend to score lower on federal tests than their Asian and white peers. Ethnomathematics advocates say that persistent achievement gaps are in part a result of overly abstract math instruction that’s disconnected from student experience, and that there’s an urgent need for new approaches that recognize mathematical knowledge as it’s practiced outside of textbooks.

Many Black and Brown students don’t feel comfortable in math classes, said Shelly Jones, professor of math education at Central Connecticut State University. She said those classes tend to be “competitive” and that teachers “hone in on what Black and Brown students don’t know as opposed to honoring what they do know.” She added:  “We are trying to pull in students who have not traditionally felt they belonged in math spaces.”

That said, research on the impact of ethnomathematics is limited, and its practice is largely confined to individual classrooms — like Kealanehele’s — where the teacher has sought out the approach. And teachers who incorporate ethnomathematics without the right support and instructional tools risk stumbling into a cultural minefield, experts say. Most teachers in U.S. classrooms are white. If one of those white teachers decides their Hispanic students should learn base-20 Mayan numbers, and their students ask why, the teacher will have to come up with an answer, said Ron Eglash, a professor in the University of Michigan’s School of Information.

“Telling kids, ‘Because it’s your heritage,’ sounds really awkward from a white teacher,” Eglash said.

But experts say that high-quality ethnomathematics lessons boost student confidence and engagement when used by teachers (of any race) who have been trained and who allow students the time to explore the material on their own and through discussion.

Ethnomathematics falls under the same umbrella as culturally responsive math instruction. Experts say that teaching math this way requires teachers to get to know their students and create a learning environment where students can connect to math concepts. It involves developing lessons that reveal the math in everyday activities, like skateboarding, braiding and weaving. It can also include exploring the math involved in cultural practices, like beading.

“A lot of this work is about removing barriers or perceptions from a marginalized population that math is something the Greeks created and is imposed on me,” said Mark Ellis, a professor of education at California State University, Fullerton. He said that culturally responsive instruction takes other measures into account, besides academic outcomes, when determining impact. These include students’ attitude about math, sense of belonging in math classes and engagement in math discourses.

Related: Eliminating advanced math ‘tracks’ often prompts outrage. Some districts buck the trend

Traditional math instruction, Ellis said, is treated as if math were acultural, even though, as we know it in the U.S., math descended from the computational traditions of many places, including Mesopotamia (360-degree circles), ancient Greece (geometry and trigonometry), India (decimal notation, the concept of zero) and China (negative numbers). If these mathematical traditions are taught, Ellis and others ask, then why not Hawaiian calculations for slope, sub-Saharan fractal geometry and Mayan counting systems?

Eglash argues that ethnomathematics lessons aren’t just for students from the culture that the lessons draw from. It’s important that students explore math concepts from all cultures, including their own, he said.

Ethnomathematics, a term coined in the 1970s by Brazilian mathematician Ubiratan D’Ambrosio, first appeared in the U.S. about 25 years ago. That’s when Eglash and his wife, University of Michigan design professor Audrey Bennett, developed a suite of teaching modules by which students learn the history or context of a practice — braiding hair into cornrows, for example — and then use algebra, geometry and trigonometry to create their own cornrow designs with software.

Eglash and Bennett designed the teaching tools with the idea that students can use a module to create their work, which can mean mixing cultures. A Puerto Rican student used Eglash’s module about Native American beading to create a Puerto Rican flag simulation.

In 2009, Richmond City Public Schools asked Eglash and Bennett to teach a module called Cornrow Curves to a class of Black 10th graders. Eglash asked the class where cornrows came from. Their answer: “Brooklyn!” That led to discussion about the African origins of cornrows — where they indicated marriage status, religious affiliation and other social markers — and on through cornrows’ history during the Middle Passage, Civil Rights, hip-hop and Afrofuturism.

Only then did the students begin doing math, designing their own cornrows, noticing how the plaits get closer together or further apart depending on the values students enter in a simulation. One student created a design for straight-line cornrows by visually estimating how far to space them apart. In her presentation to class, Eglash recalled, she said that “there are 12 spaces between the braids on one side, which covers 90 degrees, so the braids are positioned every 7.5 degrees because 90/12 = 7.5.”

The Cornrow Curves module and other lessons like it have now been adopted by districts in 25 states. The Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, began offering a culturally responsive computer science curriculum in 2008 that incorporates ethnomathematics lessons that Eglash and Bennett developed. Some evidence indicates that this course helped boost student participation in computer science: An external evaluation found that enrollment in the classes rose by nearly 800 percent from 2009 to 2014.

In 2012, Chicago Public Schools adopted the same curriculum for an introduction to computer science course and invested in significant professional development for teachers. In 2016, the course became a graduation requirement for all Chicago high school students, and 250 teachers are trained each year on the curriculum.

An outside analysis of the Chicago program showed that students who took the course before taking AP computer science were 3.5 times more likely to pass the AP computer science exam than those who only took the AP course. A separate study in Chicago and Wisconsin showed that where the course was offered racial and gender achievement divides disappeared and that students were more likely to take another computer science class.

Related: Data science under fire: What math do high schoolers really need?

Keily Hernandez, 15, a first-year student at Chicago’s George Westinghouse College Prep High School, was happy to see the computer science course on her schedule this year, because she plans to major in computer science in college. At first, she found the cornrows module challenging — getting the designs to look the way she wanted them to look was difficult — but it was also fun, she said.

The class is collaborative, she said, and students often turn to each other or to the internet for ideas and help. Hernandez said that taking the class has relieved her doubts that she can be a computer scientist.

“The class made me reassured,” she said. “Math isn’t something that you just know, the same way that computer science isn’t something that you just know. You get better at it the more you do it.”

It’s students like Hernandez that Linda Furuto wanted to attract when she took the job as head of the math and science subdivision at the University of Hawaii West Oahu in 2007. At the time, student enrollment was so low that the school offered just two math courses. Furuto, who had grown up on Oahu and received her Ph.D. in math education from the University of California, Los Angeles, recalled thinking, “This isn’t working. We need to implement ethnomathematics here.”

Over the next six years, she began to integrate ethnomathematics into coursework, and student interest grew. By 2013, the university offered more than 20 math classes.

“Students would say things like, ‘I hated math. I felt no connection to it. But now I see that math is my culture and because of that I want to be a secondary math teacher,’” Furuto said. “Just knowing that the life of a student has in some way, shape or form been transformed speaks volumes.”

In 2018,  by then a professor of mathematics education at the University of Hawaii Manoa, Furuto established the world’s first ethnomathematics graduate certificate and master’s degree program.* So far, about 300 teachers have participated in the online program; about half are from Hawaii.

While teachers in Chicago get ongoing professional development in cohorts both before and while they teach the district’s ethnomathematics-based computer science course, educators who complete the University of Hawaii program are highly likely to be the only teacher at their school with this niche training.

Sydney Kealanahele, the teacher on Oahu, said that as inspired as she was by the ethnomathematics program, she doesn’t have time to teach using the method more than twice every three months.

“To create a really good lesson that feels authentic to me, and not just thrown together,” she said, “it takes time to do the research.”

For a teacher who doesn’t have colleagues in their school using the same approach, it can be hard to fit in something new like ethnomathematics, said Janel Marr, a math resource teacher in Oahu’s Windward School District. Marr was one of the first teachers to participate in the ethnomathematics graduate program, as an eighth-grade math teacher. Today she teaches in the graduate program.

“When you go back to the classroom, there are so many other things from all sides, from administration and curriculum to state tests,” she said. “It starts to get overwhelming. It’s not being implemented as much as we in the program would want it to be.”

Related: How one district diversified its advanced math classes — without the controversy

Ideally, said Eglash, ethnomathematics content should be related to real-world situations, even if that involves exploring painful periods of history. Where possible, content should connect with art, history, sports and math to provide multiple ways for students to interact. This is critical, he said, to address power dynamics and “identity barriers” in the classroom, like the race of the teacher. When teachers let students explore content individually and through group discussion, students gain control over their own learning.

“The teacher finds a way to use the tool that is authentic — which is something the kids pick up on and respect, even for white folks,” he said. “It’s when you are trying to be something you are not that teaching becomes awkward.”

Doing ethnomathematics right can also engage teachers, Marr said. She had been teaching eighth-grade math at Kailua Intermediate School for 13 years when she hit a wall. Her students would ask why they had to learn math, she said, and she didn’t have an answer. She was looking for inspiration when she heard about the University of Hawaii ethnomathematics program.

“My students would learn to work with the numbers and everything, but it wasn’t like they were making a connection of why there is slope,” Marr said.

After earning her master’s, Marr had the idea to approach linear equations in a new way. She showed her students a photo of a mountain with a long, bare line down its lush, forested side and asked if anyone knew what they were looking at. Most students didn’t.

She wrote a word on the whiteboard: holua. The path, students learned from research they did in class, was made of gravel pounded into lava rocks, and it ran down the side of the Hualālai Volcano on the east side of Hawaii. Elite members of ancient Hawaiian communities sledded down mountainside paths like this one as part of the extreme sport known as holua.

“We talked about those pictures and talked about, well what would the slope be? How fast might they be going? Because slope is really related to the rate of speed,” she said. “Math isn’t just theoretical. It’s having an experience of being part of the place.”

*Correction: This story has been updated with the correct spelling of Sydney Kealanahele’s name, and to clarify Linda Furuto’s role when she started the ethnomathematics program.

This story about ethnomathematics was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post To engage students in math, educators try connecting it to their culture appeared first on The Hechinger Report.