The scene is buried more than midway through a research paper full of dry academic language and citations. But it is stirring – moving, even – and worth the wait.

Its setting is a computer lab on the Rutgers–Newark Campus, where a group of kids attends an after-school math program. They are seventh and eighth graders from a public school in one of the city’s bleaker neighborhoods, where test scores are among the lowest in the state.

Yet these kids are doing conceptually challenging math. During a problem-solving session, six get so excited, they literally jump out of their seats.

When one verbalizes her solution, a classmate shouts encouragement: “You go girl, you go girl!”

 
The action was videotaped as part of the Newark Public Schools Systemic Initiative in Mathematics, a multiyear, $6 million project funded by the National Science Foundation. Its goal was to enhance mathematics instruction in grades K–8 by using new approaches, including having kids grapple with complex ideas and share possible solutions with each other. The writer and researcher was Roberta Schorr, associate professor in the Department of Urban Education at Rutgers–Newark. And her article reported that the students were able, and eager, to do high-level math when afforded dignity and respect in an “emotionally safe” learning environment.

By the time the project ended in 2008, it had produced remarkable results. Between 2002 and 2007, Newark students’ proficiency in fourth-grade math increased by 33.4 percent. (In language arts, by comparison, their proficiency rose only 1.6 percent.) The students’ advanced proficiency in fourth-grade math, meanwhile, increased by nearly 20 percent.

The results spelled success for Schorr and her Newark collaborators, lead by May Samuels, director of mathematics for the Newark Public Schools. But it also provided affirmation that inner-city schools can still inspire and educate, something Schorr knew firsthand. She grew up in a housing project in Brooklyn during the 1960s and was the first in her family to go to college.

Yet at the outset of the Newark initiative, not all her friends and associates were as optimistic as Schorr. Some were downright skeptical.

“People would say, ‘If we can’t change the environment the children live in, we can’t make big differences in their education, either.’ I can’t buy that,” she said. “I can’t build brand new homes for the kids, stock the houses with books, and shut off their TVs. I can’t change all of the terrible things that some of these children may experience. But together we can change the everyday school lives of the children, if we work hard at it, and the area we can change is math.”

 People also warned Schorr that the school bureaucracy might hold her back.

“They said, ‘You’ll never get anything done in Newark. People will stand in your way,’ ” she said.

 That never happened; quite the contrary. The Office of Mathematics was very helpful. The researchers approached teachers as collaborators, and teachers were receptive, she said.

 “You can’t try to work with teachers from a place of arrogance and say, ‘I have a fancy title, so you should listen to me.’ This whole idea about dignity and respect is not just for kids,” Schorr said. “It was important that people knew I really, really wanted this to work and that the only way it would work was if we were together.”

Schorr, a former teacher who completed her graduate work at Rutgers–New Brunswick in 1996, said she is writing a new grant proposal that will focus on the teaching of high school math.

“We really want to focus on the transitional years, when we lose so many kids,” she said.

Her team of investigators is also working on a number of yet-to-be published papers related to the Newark project. Some will report on the wealth of quantitative data developed. But others will treat what may be urban educators’ hardest task: engaging kids and turning them on to the pleasure of mathematical inquiry.

Schorr saw that happen, over and over, in Newark.

 “We worked with kids who were in gangs, kids who didn’t speak in class at all. Once they see that they can do these things, there’s no turning back,” she said. “Teachers would tell us, ‘This is a kid who could barely get through math, and now he is coming up with mathematical proofs that are mind-boggling.’ I’ve shown the videos to suburban teachers who say, ‘Wow, who are these kids?’ ”