Heroes in war against dummy math - Class Struggle - The Washington Post: Like nearly all African Americans in 1954, 13-year-old Vinetta Jones knew the exasperating letdown of people thinking she was not capable of doing whatever it was she wanted to do.
Yet it was still a shock when she, an accomplished math student, walked into her all-white Detroit junior high class the first day of Algebra I and the teacher asked what she was doing there.
“This is my class,” Jones said.
The teacher said: “There must be a mistake. You wouldn’t be able to keep up.”
Forced to take Jones, the teacher never called on her even though she got an A on every test. Jones would earn a doctorate in educational psychology from the University of California at Berkeley, become an education school dean and lead statewide reform programs in California and North Carolina. With $32 million from College Board benefactors in the 1990s, she directed a program that broke the back of U.S. schools’ resistance to letting minorities, poor kids and other allegedly ill-prepared students take algebra and geometry.
