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Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Welcome back to The Takeaway. A bit of a warning for our listeners, what you hear next may be upsetting.

Speaker 1: 2B plus 20P has two terms, the 2B and 20P. Notice they are separated by a plus sign. Also, 3A plus 4 plus 2C has three terms, the 3A, the 4, and the 2C.

Lisa: It's the sound of algebra. For many people, these lessons about constants, variables, and solving for the unknown can trigger sweaty palms in the dry mouth, but algebra just might be the key to racial equity and social justice.

Bob Moses: Math and science are front and center with reading, writing. If people don't have these skills, then they really can't participate as citizens. Just as people who couldn't read and write and didn't have the right to vote, couldn't participate as citizens back in the '60s.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You're listening there to the voice of Bob Moses, who passed away this weekend at the age of 86. The legendary civil rights activists faced brutal violence as field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's, Mississippi Project. Moses was among those who authored an organizing style rooted in the genius of the many, rather than the charisma of the few. Though he'll be remembered for his courageous work to extend voting rights, much of Moses's adult life was spent teaching algebra. After winning the MacArthur award in 1982, Moses established The Algebra Project, a national effort to promote mathematical literacy among economically disadvantaged young people, and thereby opened the gates to college and to full citizenship.

Joining me now to discuss the legacy of Bob Moses and the ways math education is critical to citizenship is Lisa Cook, Professor of Economics and International Relations at Michigan State University. Professor Cook served on President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. Welcome back to The Takeaway, Professor Cook.

Lisa Cook: The pleasure is all mine, Melissa.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Maybe begin with just a little memory of Bob Moses himself. You tweeted, "Bob Moses embodied the struggle for civil and human rights along many dimensions. inspired by his vision related to math. I volunteered for the Algebra Project in Oakland." Tell me about what Bob Moses meant to you.

Lisa Cook: There are so many ways that one could contribute to the struggle for human and civil rights. The example that I saw, and Bob Moses knew my relatives who were deeply involved in the civil rights movement. He helped to organize Freedom Summer, my cousin Floyd, in particular helped to organize the Freedom Rides. That was the example that I saw. Economic development and the protection of voting rights trying to defend voting rights. Now, that's something that Bob Moses did too. When I was introduced to him, it was as a person who was studying economics or preparing to study economics.

As a person who'd already tutored math in high school and in college, I met Ben Moynahan, who was my housemate in Dakar, Senegal. Ben is the Director of Operations now at The Algebra Project. He was studying drumming, and he was turning his drumming lessons into algebra lessons. I just found this absolutely fascinating. When I got back to the US, I volunteered for The Algebra Project, having heard the Bob Moses story of civil rights through math education.

One thing that I found, and this is why it was so compelling to me, is when I tutored math in high school in particular, the main thing I was doing was not only teaching students to move to the next grade level and to excel in math, but also to teach the parents to get their kids out of the lower level math courses that would never lead to college, that would never lead to algebra, that would never lead to college preparation and would never lead to accomplishing a college degree getting a college degree.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to dig in right there for a second because I got to tell you, the first time that I met and had an opportunity to speak with Bob Moses back in 2014, I didn't get it. I was like, "What are we talking about here?" He absolutely brought me over. He showed me the light around this question of cumulative math knowledge, the way it builds and how you have to have algebra. Even when we sometimes know it, we don't know it. Can you explain to us why algebra is the great gateway for college?

Lisa Cook: Algebra is a disciplined way to solve problems and that's how Bob Moses was thinking about it. That's the way I was inherently thinking about, it but it was really implicit. One thing that I noticed was that a number of my students I was tutoring had been tracked into high school math, that was just basic math, that was just addition and subtraction. It was not algebra. It wasn't adding layers to thinking system systematically about problem-solving. It really is thinking systematically about problem-solving. I saw this live when I volunteered for The Algebra Project.

The kids that I volunteered with in Oakland were in the seventh grade and they were mainly if not exclusively African American. They were learning together for the first time. They were solving problems together for the first time and they were going back and forth. They were iterating and understanding how you got to a solution and the steps that were involved. They appreciated the various complexities of algebra without thinking about it as algebra. We had so many, they're called word problems. For seventh graders they are called word problems. They embraced them, and they enjoyed them and the content was often relevant. I was telling you that my friend Ben Moynahan was using drumbeats to convey math problems and algebra.

I was always using change, change that one makes with money, or the dates, to convey that. It was absolutely a gateway. Melissa, let me tell you about the proof in the pudding. This elementary school was adjacent to the projects in East Oakland, and a third of the students lived together in a foster home. The drug dealers were following them home because they knew they were good at math. They knew that these students were in this program, and they were trying to recruit them. The proof is in the pudding. They weren't just young, they could actually do the calculation.

Anyway, that was one testimony that I did want, I actually had to address it a couple of times. I told them about life expectancy, that was a teachable moment. Life expectancy is 35. Of course, I was making this up. I had no idea. 35, you can have a glitzy car, you're typically living with your parents. If you have aspirations that are higher than that, if you want to live longer than that, you might want to choose another profession. Anyway, I shut that down for the moment.

Melissa Harris-Perry: There are so many things about that story you just hold about those who are selling illegal narcotics on the black market nonetheless valuing math skills, as indicative of how valuable math skills are. I want to go back just a little before that when you talked about iterated collective work to solve problems. I'm not an economist. I'm a political scientist, but when I hear that, people doing iterated work together to solve problems, sounds like democracy to me.

Lisa Cook: Absolutely it does, and it is empowering. It is absolutely empowering. One of the things that was not accepted or promoted in The Algebra Project syllabus was just being told what to do. The students had the skills. They needed to come up with the solution. The students were initially frustrated because I was not giving them the answer. I was helping them get the answer but I was not giving them the answer. Sometimes there was more than one answer. The question was one of process. How did you systematically get to this? There was shared thinking, collective thinking, the loudest voices were not the ones that dominated. You could see the quiet scholars like Bob Moses arising in this group. It was absolutely something that was much more equitable and something that the students felt empowered by.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Professor Cook, here we are at the initiation of the January 6 investigation. Everything you just said has really just hit me in the gut. Again, it is in part the continuing gift of Bob Moses for you to say, "We didn't give them the answers. Sometimes there's more than one answer. It is about the process and it's about systematic thinking." Is there a way that maybe we could implement some Algebra Project for the democracy writ large here?

Lisa Cook: We need it. When I'm teaching methods courses, when I'm teaching macro, there are some basic facts and basic methods of getting to facts and understanding facts that I teach in all of my classes because it is my belief that statistical knowledge, and I would say don't get mad at me because I'm not a political scientist, but economic knowledge. I'm really saying statistical literacy is fundamental to democracy. I used to say, when I started teaching, that it will be fundamental to democracy. Absolutely it is fundamental to democracy now.

I would further argue that it would have been helpful to have had this statistical literacy during the pandemic. It still would be helpful to fight disinformation, to fight misinformation, so that people can follow a systematic process of discerning the information they've been given or have obtained. I think it's absolutely critical to a democracy and modern problems.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I was going to say, at least I am just a little Black girl living and working in the south right now. I can't help but to say this, but right now I am in church because that point about some statistical knowledge, again, I just keep thinking about meeting Bob Moses. Not quite getting it initially, feeling like he was saying, "We should teach kids STEM because those are where the good jobs are," which I always bristle at a little bit. This idea that actually at the core of what we have to do to make decisions together is to be able to adjudicate information, to understand what data are relevant, what data are not relevant and how we can have these kinds of open processes that we all understand.

Given how excited I am about it in this moment, how do we get past the math phobia that so many people have? In part, because that excitement, that drumming, that connection to the real world often isn't how math and algebra is presented to us.

Lisa Cook: That is a great question. I asked the same question about economics. The way we get people to address math phobia or the way we address math phobia is to give them problems that are relevant for their lives, is to make it interesting, to empower them with tools. One of the things that I found really funny, a colleague in engineering was saying that it was difficult to get his women engineering students to participate hackathon. I was like, "So how are they set up?" Said, "Typically people just volunteer and we come up with a question and then people spend all day and all night 24 hours straight working on that problem and they come up with a solution." I said, "Where are women in the planning of these hackathons?"

He said, "Actually one time when I did this, involved some women at the very beginning and we saw more women show up than ever, because this was a problem that was relevant for them and they were bored by these other questions." What we know from the literature from the empirical literature is that biomedical devices are skewed right now towards men because they're the ones who are making them and women typically invent to solve problems that are for women and that should not be the case. This is more than half the population.

We should be more empathetic and sympathetic and that's why we want more, in my view, more women in STEM and more women in patenting. We need to solve a lot of problems and not just the problems we particularly have. I have medical devices for all tall people, for example. If I were left to my own devices, everything would be for tall people."

Melissa Harris-Perry: [laughs] For all my listeners who do not know and cannot in this moment see Lisa Cook, she is a tall regal Maya Angelou-esque woman. I so appreciate that. Professor Lisa Cook is Professor of Economics and International relations at Michigan State University and a former volunteer for The Algebra Project with the late Bob Moses. Thank you so much for joining us Lisa.

Lisa Cook: The pleasure was all mine. Thank you Melissa.

Melissa Harris-Perry: If you're a math teacher or an econ professor, or if you just know how to make math interesting, we want to hear from you. Give us a call or send us a tweet because we want to know about the word problems that breakthrough that math phobia for you and your students.

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