ABSTRACT
The appellate court of New York State issued a verdict just last fall. They were looking at a case where a federal district court decision had said the state should give more money to New York City schools. And the state appellate court said that the state is responsible to see that its children have an education which allows them to serve on juries and to vote. They said an eighth-grade education is sufficient for that. Furthermore, one of the justices, Justice Lerner, said that there are a lot of low-paying jobs out here, and so people who have that kind of education can fill those jobs. Well, sharecropper education has moved to the urban areas of this country. [Pause]
We are currently raising serfs in our inner cities. Just as the sharecroppers in the Delta areas were serfs in the industrial
economy, the young people today are doomed to be serfs in this information economy with its technology of computers. So the work that we do with the Algebra Project, we view it as a continuation of the work that we did in the 1960s. In the 1960s we used the right to vote to get political access. We are organizing around math literacy for educational and economic access. Thank you.
