Everly and Stand Your Ground

On the weekend in July near the date that marked three years since Everly died, I began writing this post.  It seemed a good time to return to an idea that started to germinate when I was writing a book review back in February.  Kelly Brown Douglas, in Stand Your Ground:  Black Bodies and the Justice of God, addresses many aspects of whiteness and its theopolitical underpinnings.  As I worked through her excellent presentation, certain parts of her argument drew me into thinking about Everly's work over a quarter century of leadership in transforming how mathematics is taught in public schools.  On that weekend, I started to write about ways that Douglas's theological work and Everly's work in math education are challenging the same kinds of problems.  Now, almost three months later as I celebrate her birthday, I'm going to finish it.

Everly's earliest efforts to influence the way that math is taught began soon after arriving in North Carolina, fresh out of her MS degree in math education from the University of Texas in Austin.  Administrators quickly recognized that as a classroom teacher, she had the potential both through example and leadership to reshape math teaching in a way that more students could have an opportunity to succeed in what is too often thought of as a subject matter for only an elite few.  However, as soon as she was elevated to a position of leadership, she began to meet resistance from the experienced teachers who were already sure that the way to teach math had to be pretty much the same way that they were taught math.  In other words, they, who had emerged as some of the few to succeed in math in a previous generation, seemed satisfied to continue the same pedagogy that rewards only a few.  They were among the few who are able to decipher a code of learning targeted at a narrow portion of the classroom.  It is not surprising to me that this first cadre of organized resistance was made up of an all-white group of teachers.

At the time, Everly and I were not particularly sensitized to the way that math functioned as a marker for racial difference in many education systems.  Even though we were in our mid-twenties, we had not previously lived and worked in places where we met and interacted with African Americans on a regular basis.  In the particular communities of Texas where we grew up, ethnic difference was more directly defined by Mexican American and Anglo American communities.  Having moved for the first time into the South, rather than the Southwest, we were only beginning to get direct experience of the racialized structures of education.  Her teaching both in Chapel Hill and in Durham played a role in reshaping her understanding of the role race plays in math education, especially as it became more clear who had access to higher math classes and who did not.

When Everly got the opportunity to become the coordinator for mathematics education in Durham Public Schools, she intensified her study of the way young people learn math.  That led her into conversations across the country about the gaps in mathematics achievement that show up between minority and majority communities.  She became engaged with leaders who were challenging the idea that some people by their genetic heritage will not be good at math.  She found many of the education leaders in Durham and elsewhere unwilling to have those conversations.  Some bosses told her to stop saying "achievement gap" in public meetings.

Before long she had successfully navigated the federal grants process and received a $5 million plus, four-year grant to revamp math teaching in Durham.  The focus of the program was to change curriculum and the culture of math teaching.  She set out to implement a new curriculum based on study of how math is taught in the countries where students achieve highest on international math tests.  Using a teacher-led, grassroots process, she led the Durham school teachers to select one of the reforming math curricula that the National Science Foundation funding was seeking further research on.

Implementing the curriculum would not be possible within the culture of traditional math teaching.  Everly implemented a district-wide professional development which took every elementary teacher and every middle- and high-school math teacher through about 100 contact hours of training.  The math curriculum schedule for professional development in Durham during those crucial years had over 250 times as many training events as any other teaching field.

The curriculum program was called RAMP:  Realizing Achievement in Mathematics Performance.  Influenced by civil rights leaders Robert Moses and Charles Cobb who through the Algebra Project were advancing the agenda of the Civil Rights Movement into reforming education, she insisted that every child have access to learning higher math.  With Lisa Delpit she championed teaching the same level of skills to all students.  She embraced Carol Malloy's research on the centrality of access to higher math as the barrier for black achievement.  This ruffled feathers in schools where principles and teachers had colluded to steer certain students, often by skin color, away from algebra classes to keep only an elite group of high achievers taking the high-stakes tests by which schools would be compared and graded.  Pushback came from parents who were not used to seeing poor or black children in certain math classes.  When those minority students were making good grades in math, the scuttlebutt assumption was that higher math courses were being "dumbed down."

Kelly Brown Douglas talks about the history and continuing legacy of Anglo-Saxon Exceptionalism, a version of white supremacy that identifies intelligence and political expertise as the heritage of a specific group of Northern Europeans.  Elsewhere and other times, similar ideas were expressed as Aryan mythology.  This particularly inherent giftedness of a people group justifies their management, supremacy, and control over the destinies of other groups.  Their Manifest Destiny, as Douglas also points out, demands that they extend their power and influence over greater areas, regardless of the wishes of others who may contest their claim to lands and goods.  As Douglas goes on to argue, the Black Lives Matter movement has risen up to challenge the heritage of these aspects of white supremacist ideology which still lead to systemic repression of minorities, even in a world of "racism without racists."

Everly strove to press this agenda against an entrenched belief that there is one good way to teach math that has been used successfully from eternity.  If only 10% of US students are excelling in math, then how can we believe that the way it is being taught is adequate?  Instead, a false belief in the supremacy of a particular genetic pool, children who really may not even need a teacher to help them understand math, has become a justification for not really trying to teach the rest of the students.

Could it be that children of various backgrounds might be trained to solve problems in different ways?  And could those strategies be effective if not immediately shut down by the canonical and only acceptable form of problem-solving being passed on by the elitist tradition of math teaching?  What if the order of courses (algebra 1, geometry, algebra 2) and the concepts and content of those courses were reorganized in a way that coordinates with brain development, cumulative learning processes, and the usefulness of the math processes for collateral science course learning?  Yet many teachers and successful math student parents assume that "since I learned math this way, it must be the right way to learn it."  Accepting the failure of most children seems far from good educational practice.  Trying to cure the problem by doing the same thing harder and with more testing just sounds dumb.  As Bob Moses has insisted, we need to give up the idea of a "math gene" that only a tiny minority has, and start trying to teach in ways that all students can learn.

Everly found the resistance to these changes daunting.  Some schools in Durham did all they could to "opt out" of change.  Some parent groups, unable to accept success of minority students, pressed to have the curriculum changes reversed.  Everly's doctoral research was showing that the change was real.  White students' achievement was going up.  Black students' achievement was going up even faster and the gap was closing significantly.  RAMP was good for all groups.  But social inertia can't always handle the truth.  People make up their minds based on deeply embedded prejudices that keep them from seeing the light that is breaking in.  Some high administrators decided that they would rather stop the complaints than try to understand and defend the progress.  Everly was "reassigned" within the school district to work on a project she philosophically opposed, a clear invitation to find another job.

She was quickly snatched up by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, and she carried her research and agenda to address the statewide curriculum.  After several years of successful work for North Carolina, she went to the Texas Education Agency to lead a statewide curriculum reform there in the second largest state school system in the US.  She made many important steps there, including having a curriculum reform adopted by the State Board of Education.  It was her last professional action, and the final vote took place while she was in the hospital struggling through her first chemotherapy treatments.

Bodies don't mark off some for intellectual achievement and others for backbreaking labor.  Failure to innovate, to listen, to teach creatively and constructively are the central barriers to achievement in mathematics.  May Everly's tribe increase, and may her work continue to inspire and bear fruit for all children.

Old Woman Everly, Whom We Did Not Get to See

Today as I read someone's tribute to an elderly woman who had passed away, I began to muse about Everly.  In our church, Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church in Durham, NC, Everly eventually found and settled into her own specific roles.  It is important to remember that when we arrived at Mt. Level, we did so having left a white baptist church, where our family had to face a temporary failure in the ongoing struggle to overcome a long heritage of racial prejudice and division.

By God's grace, we had enough wisdom to know that we could not go into a black baptist church and operate on the assumptions that "we know how churches should operate."  In other words, we could not try to import our "white ways" into Mt. Level on the assumption that white baptists know more than black baptists about being a church.  So we agreed together and admitted to our new fellow church members that we were novices, learners.  Part of our own struggle had made us realize that whatever gifts we had to serve in church had been inadequate to find a path to unity in the church we had previously served.  We definitely could not claim the expertise of success.

Everly tried using her gifts at church in a number of ways.  We all know that part of her divine calling meant that she worked long hours in complex leadership and negotiation about the future of mathematics education and its availability to children of all races, ethnicities, class distinctions, and regions.  That was God's work, too.  So her  work at Mt. Level needed to complement and not conflict with her high professional calling.  Some things just did not fit.  Others did not match her abilities.  She could not get the hang of how the choir learned and sang its music.  (Insert your own joke about white people, clapping, etc., here.)  She loved the music, but clapping and moving her feet and singing--the lack of training for so many decades made this seem too much to her. 

She taught classes at several levels.  One place she landed for a few years was teaching pre-teens and middle-schoolers in Sunday School.  She helped them think about the questions they brought to the Bible and their faith.  She helped them learn to pray and care about people.  She let them know that she loved them and had high expectations for them.  For this reason, Everly always had some young people around at church who called her, or at least thought of her as "Mom."  Of course, she was a loving mom to her own progeny as well.  One of David's most important encouragements since Everly's death has been to find and look at and post the many, many pictures of himself being hugged by his mom.  That little girl who played teacher for the neighborhood kids grew to be a teacher and a mother who loved the children God gave her.

One thing she taught and encouraged these children to do was draw handmade encouragement cards for the older members of the church, the "sick and shut-in list."  They would draw flowers, landscapes, churches, and such.  They would copy or adapt pictures from their Sunday School books that had Bible scenes or Christian symbols.  They would write, "God Loves You," or "Get Well Soon," or copy words from hymns or Bible verses.  Everly would gather these colorful notes and put them in the mail to bless the lives of people who were struggling or alone.

These cards from the children were part of a bigger role Everly had taken for herself.  The group of adult women to which she officially belonged was the Adult Missionaries.  It is not strictly for women, but that was the de facto participation.  The problem with participating was it did not suit her work schedule and home duties.  So she rarely attended their regular meetings, though she participated in many of their occasional events.  But the regular task she took for herself was sending cards to the sick and shut-in.  She would buy boxes of cards with Bible verses, Christian sentiments, and various messages for birthdays, illness, sympathy, and friendship.  It was not every week, but regularly she would write notes to these people. 

Demographically, we understand that most of the older people in our society are women, whose life expectancy continues to exceed men's by about a decade.  So most of the cards were sent to women.  Although I am a minister at Mt. Level, my personality and patterns of conversation are very different from Everly's.  I often did not know the names on the sick and shut-in list.  I might have befriended some of the older adults, but I am not so good at keeping up with people.  Everly knew these women, and men, by name.  She knew their health conditions.  She knew their family members.  She knew how long since they had been able to attend church.  And she wrote them loving notes to make sure that they understood how much they mean to our church.

Probably as much as any reason that I am loved at Mt. Level is that Everly is associated with me, and that she showed so much love to these older members and their families.  If it were just Mike, few of them would ever have heard from the Broadways.  My mind does not work that way, I regret to say.  But because of Everly, the Broadways were busy caring for families and for older folks who appreciated receiving a child's drawing, a kind word, a remembrance from their church.

Everly also joined the Prayer Team, a ministry of the Missionaries.  She helped them organize their retreats and events.  At the resident mathematician, she handled the bookkeeping and received funds from people to pay for retreat expenses and such.  She learned who could afford to participate and who could not, and she made sure through her own donations and the donations she solicited from others that no one would be left out.  People came to appreciate her compassion, knowing that she would look out for those who struggled financially.

So today I read about the passing of a woman from another church.  I thought about the tribute that pastor made toward her elderly member who had died.  And I thought about what kind of "old lady" Everly would have been.  She had such sympathy and kindness toward older women.  She saw their strengths and wisdom, and she sought them out.  She learned about their adult children and the joys and struggles of being a mother across an entire life.  She met their children and learned of their love for their mothers.

When we were a very young couple, living in California where I attended seminary, Everly was befriended by Bobbi Pinson, the wife of the seminary president.  The Pinsons had known my parents when they were a young married couple, before I was born.  That friendship continued over the years, and Bill Pinson invited me to be his research assistant at the seminary.  Bobbi and Everly were a good match, even with their age difference.  One of the favorite conversations Everly had with Bobbi involved thinking about growing old.  Bobbi had been dealing with an aging relative whose struggles in life seem to have pushed her over into only seeing the bad side of things.  Having tried so hard to help this woman find some good in life, Bobbi was very frustrated.  She told Everly, "We need to practice being pleasant and not complaining now, so that when we get older, we won't be always looking at the bad side of things."  Everly often came back to that conversation and laughed about it.  She knew too well she could easily drift over into letting her fears or struggles take over her view of the world.  But she also learned to avoid falling in that pit.  And when she got tripped up, she learned to work her way out of it.

Everly demonstrated her capacity to deal with pain and struggle with grace during her time with cancer.  She rose above the consciousness of pain to think about others whom she loved.  She made sure that to the extent that she had any power to do so, her children and husband would be provided for even after she was gone.  As her friend Marsha reported, even when she was feeling so bad, she was writing Marsha a note on the anniversary of her dad's death. 

I don't mean she never talked about her pain.  Of course she did, and necessarily so.  But even though her fight against cancer became her primary work for her final year, she continued to look out for others and organize to make their lives better.  When Lydia went back to college last fall, after Everly's death, one of the things she realized that she had to face was that even when she was very sick, Everly had hopped in the car to drive to Waco to help Lydia set up her dorm or apartment and make sure she was at ease and ready for school.  We have cute pictures of Everly in her cancer cap, crashed on Lydia's bed, worn out from getting things in order to make sure her baby was set for school.  So we know that in her old age, she would have still been doing what she could to make other people's lives better and show her love to the ones God had given her.

Everly was drawn to relationships with the Mt. Level older women for various reasons.  One common remark I would hear from her is that so-and-so "is feisty" or "is spunky."  I think all of us who know Everly understand why this was attractive to her.  Everly was the definition of feisty or spunky.  She almost could not help saying what she thought, even if it might seem impolitic.  Everly believed in telling the truth and in speaking one's mind.  That is definitely the kind of old lady she would have been.

She also was drawn to women whose devotion to God had helped them make it through very painful and even devastating life events.  Although to us she was very strong, Everly often feared that she was too weak to face harsh turns of events.  She was encouraged to learn of women who had endured abuse or hardship, painful losses or betrayals, and come out able to keep on walking, keep on trusting God, keep on following Jesus.  This was her life's ambition, "I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own" (Gal. 3:12).  Everly would have shown this same strength of character in her old age.  She would have been an old lady whose strength emanated and flowed into the lives of those around her.  Naomi has often said that she is thankful that her mother was a strong woman who surrounded her daughters with strong women.  This would not have changed with age, and her strength would have given a backbone to many a struggling soul.

Everly also loved to retell the funny stories and remarks she heard from the mouths of her older sisters.  She loved humor, and should I say she especially loved sarcastic humor?  Older women who found something to laugh about in their lives, even in the ways that age imposed its limits on them, were the ones she wanted to be around.  Everly, like these women, was proud and deserving of respect.  But she, like them, could still laugh about the way that life is going, poke fun at the powerful and self-important, and in general have a good time.  So for all of you blessed to hear Everly laugh so hard that she shed tears, and even snorted out loud, you know she would have been fun to be around as an old lady.

Further, Everly enjoyed listening to the wisdom of experience that came with knowing older women.  They were models of her future.  They had learned things she could not learn on her own.  Moreover, being a white woman among black women, there was another whole realm of wisdom she might not have learned in the ivory towers of power or among her own family.  These women had struggled with matters unheard of in the white suburbs.  So she listened and learned.  She wrote down things that were said to her and pigeon-holed them away in her ever-present sticky notes, whether hard copy or electronic. 

Senior adult Everly would have words of wisdom.  We know it is true because as the months and weeks drew her nearer to death, she started what she called "leaving messages."  Our friend Barbara Martin reminded me recently of the day last summer, July 4, when Barbara, her daughter Marsha, and her grandson Timothy all visited with Everly in Austin.  We did not know, but it was just two weeks before she would die.  Some of you realize that our three children, David, Naomi, and Lydia, are each separated in age by three years (one more result of sharing life with someone who is always planning with mathematics in mind).  It was three years after Lydia's birth that Marsha and Paul Lewis had their first and only child, Timothy.  So we always considered him the fourth in a series.  Everly's heart embraced him as hers too, and on that day she sat him down to say to him in her best way that he must know who he is and whose he is.  He must believe in the plans God has for him and pursue all the good that God has for him.  I don't know all of what she said, but she was practicing up for being a wise old woman. 

I wish, of course, that I could have known that wise, funny, feisty, strong, loving old woman.  It is not to be.  The cancer kept her from living that possible life.  But then again, I think I do know that woman.  The signs and pieces were there already for me to remember.  The examples she planned to follow were all around us.  And since she is still in us in many ways, I guess I'll get to grow old with her in one way.  She'll always be a voice in my thoughts, an embrace in my heart, a snide remark in my conversations, and a friend who would never leave me.

Celebrating a Leader in Math Education

This week began with milestones to celebrate. Everybody knows about Tuesday, but that was the second one for me. On Monday, Everly Broadway, my beloved, successfully defended her dissertation: African American Achievement in High School Mathematics. It is a study of how reforming curriculum can influence achievement for all students, with special attention to the way that a better designed curriculum can benefit African American students. I am now proud to be married to Dr. Broadway, the degree soon to be officially conferred.

For some time, educators have discussed the “achievement gap” between minorities and white students in the U. S. education system. Many have focused research on the school atmosphere and the teachers’ ways of interacting with students. Habits of low expectations for minority students influence the ways some teachers teach. Research into different expectations of girls and boys in math class has led to significant insight into the ways teachers interact with students. Gender research has helped to bolster the recognition that race, ethnicity, and economic level may affect the expectations and teaching practices of classroom teachers.

Embedded deeper in the teaching of mathematics is a cultural assumption that only an elite few people are smart in mathematics. This assumption about a born elite has sometimes been referred to in shorthand as “the math gene.” So thorough is this cultural formation that no one is surprised to hear a highly competent professional adult say, “I’ve always been bad at math.” Earlier education research addressed the problem as “math anxiety.”

Dr. Broadway has been driven by, among many issues, the way that this view of mathematics is so thoroughly naturalized in the culture at large, and particularly in the culture of education. I don’t know how many times she has asked me questions like: “Why do people think it’s fine for only 10% to succeed in math? Why would teachers be satisfied to assume that almost all students in high school cannot learn math?”

Based on her findings, this is not the assumption of many other education systems in other parts of the world. Moreover, where the education system does not assume “the math gene,” teachers, mathematicians, administrators, and school counselors take on the challenge of conducting research and finding ways to do a better job of teaching math to all students. If you already believe that 90% will not be able to cut it, that puts the whole system off the hook for not doing better at bringing all students up to the standard.

Dr. Broadway has taken up with civil rights veteran activists and historians, such as Bob Moses, Charles Cobb, and Charles Payne, and mathematician and educational reformer Carol Malloy, sharing their cause of analyzing and closing the achievement gap in mathematics. They have described access to courses in higher mathematics as one of the great civil rights struggles of this era. Part of the problem is that too many schools have designed their math curriculum to delay or discourage students from starting to take higher math courses. Along with the structural barriers, so many families and neighborhoods are full of discouraged people who fear that since they had a hard time in math, their children will not be good at it. As with any struggle to open up opportunity, there is the need to change both the structures of power and the hopes of those who have not had access.

How often have teachers, frustrated that a student does not quickly “get it” in algebra class concluded that the student just does not have what it takes to succeed in math? How often have teachers, who found math easy as students, assumed that the way they were taught must be the best or only way to teach math courses? How often have well-meaning school counselors discouraged students from taking higher math courses on the assumption that they would find them too challenging and probably fail? How often have school administrators made judgments about tracking students into lower math courses because they are used to seeing certain groups do poorly in math? How often has the motivation to push more students into learning higher math been undermined in part by the conflicting short-term goal of keeping scores up on high-stakes tests in algebra and geometry?

Dr. Broadway’s research looks at new ways of designing high school math curriculum which show promise in helping all students achieve in math. Her research shows that when African American students are given opportunities to take higher level math courses, they can succeed in them. It shows that the curriculum design which links mathematics to real problems from science, from professions, from economics, from public policy—from the kinds of things that matter to human living—students who have been assumed not to be capable of “getting it,” can “get it.” Better math curriculum design delivered to all students makes “the math gene” appear as what it is—a myth. School systems committed to success in math for all students can make headway across the board, and the achievement gap can be narrowed. Over time, perhaps it can even disappear.

Dr. Broadway’s research examines the qualitative research, and has much promise to offer in this area. At its core, however, it is a quantitative study of achievement. The results on the initial high school math course leave no doubt. Better courses can improve math learning for African American students, and they can make a dramatic difference in a short time.

The disappearance of the achievement gap probably will not be immediate, but it is not so far away as most would assume. Much effort is being proposed and even carried out to make sure that children of all economic levels get a good start in school from an early age. Finding ways to back away from the industrial sized schools toward more high-touch schools closer to where children live is gaining momentum. Linking education to mentoring, internships, and specialized training is making a comeback. Changing our ways of thinking about math learning is an important next step. Dr. Broadway is committed to opening the doors so that “every child can achieve in higher mathematics.” I have heard her say those words hundreds of times, and it is her passion. There are many reasons why these words are true, and the rest of us need to join her to see that this mission will be carried forward.