An Insurrectionary Generation:

The Baltimore Algebra Project is a student-run, student-staffed nonprofit that employs public high schoolers and recent graduates as math study group leaders and as organized advocates for quality education as a constitutional right. In this essay Jay Gillen draws on his experiences as a facilitator of the Algebra Project to argue that only a generation of young people—and particularly young people in poverty—has the potential and the necessary boldness to break the caste system of schooling. In this struggle, they follow their ancestors who “earned” the insurrections required to break the slave and sharecropper systems. How young people in poverty interpret Obama’s election, asserts Gillen, will determine what Obama means for educational justice.

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Jay Gillen is the Baltimore City Schools’ facilitator for the Baltimore Algebra Project. His teaching focuses on Ella Baker’s question: how do people face a system that does not lend itself to their needs and devise the means to change it? He is currently studying youth employment in knowledge work as a constituent element in the right to education.