Giving Compass' Take:
- Melodie K. Baker shares her experiences of racial inequity in advanced math class access when she was a middle school student.
- How can funders advocate for systems change towards racial equity in access to advanced classes, particularly in STEM subjects?
- Learn more about key issues in education and how you can help.
- Search our Guide to Good for nonprofits focused on education in your area.
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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, underscoring the racial inequity in advanced math class access.
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.
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.
Read the full article about racial inequity in advanced math access by Melodie K. Baker at The Hechinger Report.