Connecting the university to inner-city secondary school mathematics

Primus: Problems, Resources, and Issues in Mathematics Undergraduate Studies, Jun 2002 by Case, Robert

The following by-products of this course for teachers are especially noteworthy: firstly, the course itself was a further indication that Northeastern had committed itself to collaboration with the public schools for the long haul; secondly, the informal approach of Jane DeVoe, who had had previous experience in public school teaching, created an invaluable rapport with the teachers. The overall message, which built a high comfort level among those involved, was that the University was committed to a collegial participation with the Boston schools. These qualities are the opposite of the impression that can be left by university involvement that is not thought through: that of a threatening, short-lived, possibly exploitative, somewhat dictatorial intervention.

Some of the teachers in this after-school course came from schools where calculus was being taught, but many were from schools where no calculus class was available. A basic theme was emerging that a principal task ought to be the setting up of calculus courses in schools that had no calculus. The differences in curriculum and therefore student opportunity between suburban and city schools - and even closer to home, between "exam" schools and district schools - were being perceived as too striking to ignore. In fact, the after-school course for teachers served as a bridge between two stages in the metamorphosis of the entire outreach project: the earlier, preliminary stage of holding classes on campus; and the new emerging identity - establishing calculus classes in the district schools themselves, a fundamental change that was coming to be owned by the schools and the teachers.

The funding sources of the course for teachers were themselves symptomatic of the change in direction - at the beginning, support for the course came from the Northeastern University Regional Center for Minorities, but this initial assistance was undertaken in the expectation of a new grant to the University from the National Science Foundation. The grant was in fact received, and part of it was utilized to fund the second and third semesters of the teachers' course in reform calculus. This grant, designating Northeastern University as a center for calculus reform, was innovative in that written into it was a secondary school component whose goal was establishing calculus in the Boston schools lacking a calculus curriculum.

INTRODUCING CALCULUS IN BOSTON SCHOOLS, 1994-1997

On June 12, 1994, the Boston Globe reported on the mathematics curriculum in the city's high schools. In the entire city of Boston, with the exception of the three "exam" schools, only three African-American students and three Latino students were enrolled in calculus in their schools. This was a devastating finding in a school system with over three thousand seniors with African-American and Hispanic students making up 74% of the school population. Many of the schools, as noted, had no calculus offering whatever. And Boston's problem was not unique to it, but common in cities of the United States. Many inner-city public high schools nationally offered no calculus.