President & Founder, The Algebra Project, Inc.

Bob Moses was born and raised in Harlem, NY, where he attended public schools. He received a B.A. in Philosophy from Hamilton College in 1956, and received an M.A. in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1957. Moses directed the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s Mississippi Voter Registration Project from 1961-1964; was co-Director of the Council of Federated Organizations 1962-1964, and was a lead organizer for the 1964 Mississippi “Freedom” Summer Project, parachuting Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to 1964 National Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. 

Moses taught mathematics at the Samé School in Tanzania, East Africa from 1969 – 1976, when he returned to the United States and re-entered the doctoral program in Philosophy at Harvard.

A MacArthur Foundation Fellow 1982-1987, he used his fellowship to begin the Algebra Project, which uses mathematics as organizing tool for quality education for all children in America. With support of the National Science Foundation the Algebra Project works with middle and high school students who previously performed in the lowest quartile on standardized exams, proposing that they attain a high school math benchmark: graduate on time in four years, ready to do college math for college credit. 

Moses is co-author with Charles E. Cobb, Jr., of the book Radical Equations—Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project (Beacon Press, 2001); and co-editor with Theresa Perry, et al., ofQuality Education as a Constitutional Right-creating a grassroots movement to transform public schools (Beacon, 2010). For information on Algebra Project approaches to the teaching and learning of mathematics, please see Practitioner’s Use of the 5-Step Curricular Process, a 3 min. video:https://stemforall2020.videohall.com/presentations/1898

Moses was the Distinguished Visitor for the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University 2011-2012, and has been an adjunct lecturer at NYU School of Law from 2012 - 2016. He has served on the Education Advisory Committee of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute from 2004 to the present. In May 2016, the University of North Carolina press published Dr. Laura Visser-Maessen’s book, Robert Parris Moses – a life in civil rights and leadership at the grassroots.  He has received numerous honorary doctorate degrees, has delivered keynote speeches and workshops nationwide, and has served as principal investigator on eight National Science Foundation mathematics education research awards to date; most recently NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot award # 1649342 and NSF INCLUDES Conference award # 1650533.

For more information on current efforts to develop a national “We the People – Math Literacy for All” Alliance that is calling on the nation for Direct Federal Investment and Involvement in supporting mathematics literacy for all K-12 students, and particularly for students performing in the lowest quartile on state standardized exams, please visit https://www.mathliteracyforall.org and see a 2019 video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBj0pZ_avko

Rita Janes has been exemplary as a teacher at all levels, a mathematics coordinator, a university instructor, a researcher, a writer of mathematics materials and assessments, a moving force in curriculum work, a leader in professional development, and a conference planner and speaker. She worked diligently on committees of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), served her province and nation at a superior level in many ways, served NCTM members from the United States and Canada at the highest levels, and did it all with a quiet air of confidence and intuition that what she did was in the best interests of mathematics education.

Rita Janes served on several NCTM committees, including the Educational Services Committee, where she helped outline the entire NCTM Navigation series, the Regional Services Committee; the Affiliated Services Committee; and the Professional Development Services Committee, where she served as chair in the years when the Focus of the Year and Learn and Reflect were outlined and became integral to the work of the Council. Rita's major service was at the turn of the century when the Council benefited from her wisdom, sincerity, and objectivity to better meet the professional development needs of teachers. This also fed into her work with conferences as chair, co-chair, or a member of several Canadian regional meetings and the NCTM Annual Meeting & Exposition in Washington in 2005.  One supporter said, “She was the loudest voice for encouraging mathematics teachers to expand their knowledge by becoming active members of NCTM. She was the reason I joined NCTM.”

As a teacher of teachers, Rita mentored teachers throughout Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and the United States with her enthusiasm about the importance of understanding mathematical concepts and her beliefs that any child can learn mathematics and that every teacher must understand the concepts that they are teaching. In service to Canadian mathematics education specifically, she has written books, worked on curriculum committees, and refined assessment tools during her career.

As the lead or co-author for several books, chapters, articles, and scripts for television series, Rita Janes has influenced many mathematics educators. She was a writer of assessment items for the Student Achievement Indicators Program and conducted many summer institutes for teachers of mathematics. She has also influenced parents in their role in the mathematics education of children.

Rita Janes received the Barnes Award for outstanding contributions to the professional development of teachers in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador and was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for her dedicated service to peers, community, and Canada. This honor is given to few and exemplifies the work of Rita Janes outside of mathematics education.

Karen Karp is a professor in the EdD program at the Johns Hopkins School of Education. For 21 years prior to this appointment, she was a professor of mathematics education in the Department of Early and Elementary Childhood Education at the University of Louisville. She is the 2020 recipient of the NCTM Lifetime Achievement Award. She is the author or co-author of 22 book chapters, approximately 45 articles and more than 26 books, including Elementary and Middle School Mathematics: Teaching Developmentally, Student Centered Mathematics; Developing Essential Understanding of Addition and Subtraction for Teaching Mathematics; and Inspiring Girls to Think Mathematically. She is a former member of the board of directors of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) and a former president of the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators. While on the NCTM board, she was co-principal investigator on a grant funded by the National Science Foundation to bring together teams of mathematics and special educators to develop research supporting the teaching of mathematics to students with disabilities. She continues to work in classrooms across the country to support teachers of students with disabilities in their mathematics instruction.

Dr. Marta Civil received a BS degree in mathematics from the University of Barcelona in Spain in 1981. Continuing her education, she received an MS degree in teaching mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1985 and a PhD in education in the field of mathematics education from the same university. She joined the Department of Mathematics at the University of Arizona in 1990, where she is a professor and presently holds the Roy F. Grasser Endowed Chair.

She is not only a very capable mathematics scholar but also an outstanding individual who cares about her work, her colleagues, and her students. One of her most notable achievements is that she served as the lead principal investigator for the National Science Foundation–funded Center for the Mathematics Education of Latinos. She is noted for her ability to continually organize a large and complex project that involved four research universities over the course of a decade. Dr. Civil’s scholarly work has been and continues to be innovative and unique in mathematics education. She is nationally known for developing the project Math and Parent Partnerships in the Southwest, which was an NSF-funded project involving immigrant parents, primarily women whose home country is Mexico, in learning about mathematics education in the United States.

Dr. Civil has a tremendous amount of energy and continued passion for diversity, equity, and social justice in mathematics education, incorporating a sociocultural framework in her scholarship. She is well known for her work to examine the intersection of assets that the immigrant Mexican community brings to mathematics education. Her passion is to persevere and do important work in mathematics education, a field still dominated by cognition and generally void of historical considerations.

In her almost 40-year career, Dr. Civil has amassed an impressive scholarly record, publishing approximately 45 refereed journal articles, co-editing 11 books, and authoring more than 50 book chapters. She is particularly successful in securing large federally funded grant projects. As a Latinx scholar, she is dedicated to mentoring and supporting students of color for success.

Dr. Civil has transformed the education field, drawing attention to the assets of the Mexican immigrant population and playing a leading role in ensuring the preparation of the next generation of leaders in the nation who have expertise in both mathematics education and bilingual education. In 2020, Professor Marta Civil was named the University Distinguished Outreach Professor at the University of Arizona, recognizing her innovative work, which brilliantly merges outreach and research, and making her an internationally renowned scholar as well as a valuable member of the community. She has served as an officer and on various committees for the National Academy of Sciences, the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators, the NCTM Research Committee, TODOS-Mathematics for All, and Psychology in Mathematics Education.

Dr. Elizabeth Fennema completed a BS degree in psychology from Kansas State College in 1950, her MA degree in education from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1952, and a PhD, also from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, in education with an emphasis in mathematics education. She worked at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1962 to 1996. She is the quintessential model of lifelong learning. Her zest for unearthing answers to important questions, and her persistence in that pursuit, lit a similar fire in students and colleagues.

Elizabeth Fennema was a pioneer in so many ways. She forged a path in mathematics education for women; she pushed the field to consider gender issues; she created new ways to capture beliefs; she created a research program that was centered in classrooms; and she urged us all to think about issues of equity. Dr. Fennema inspired countless elementary school teachers to rely not on a single math textbook that too often failed to meet students where they were, but instead to flexibly and creatively adapt their teaching to incorporate how children understand number.

A prodigious researcher, author, and educator, Fennema’s myriad works resulted in many honors, notably a Presidential Citation from the American Educational Research Association (AERA; 1997), an inaugural awardee presentation for Outstanding Contribution to Research on Women and Education, and being named a member of the National Academy of Education (NAE) in 1997. During the 1970s, she served on the JRME Editorial Panel and the NCTM Research Advisory Committee, including chairing the committee.

Dr. Fennema is known for two field-changing bodies of work, either of which alone would be worthy of lasting recognition. First is her work about gender in mathematics. After publishing a review of gender differences literature in the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education in 1974, she teamed with Julia Sherman to produce what are now known as the Fennema-Sherman studies. With methodological rigor and new measurement tools (the Fennema-Sherman Scales), the pair redefined knowledge and perspectives on the intersection between gender and achievement in mathematics, showing that underperformance by females was sociocultural in nature and a function of opportunity, and not due to differences in biology. In the 1980s, Dr. Fennema joined Thomas Carpenter and others for another grand body of work that came to be known as cognitively guided instruction (CGI). The research program was a model for applying new theories of constructivism to children’s mathematics learning. Dr. Fennema’s work in CGI took equally seriously the development of professional development to empower teachers to use their findings to improve elementary mathematics education. This combination of understanding student cognition and developing teacher learning in the same research program was ambitious and relatively novel for the time. As a result, few, if any, mathematics research programs to date have been as comprehensive, rigorous, and beneficial to the field of mathematics education as CGI.

Fennema has been awarded for her work by the American Educational Research Association and the Association for Women in Mathematics Education and was named a member of the National Academy of Education in 1997.

Steven Leinwand began his mathematics career receiving a BA degree from Wesleyan University in economics in 1971 and an MS degree from Central Connecticut State University in educational supervision and administration in 1976. After teaching for seven years at Middletown (Connecticut) High School, including the School-within-a-School Program, he served as a mathematics coordinator, a project director for two National Science Foundation–sponsored summer institutes, and as a college instructor of secondary mathematics courses at Wesleyan University. When he became the mathematics supervisor for the Connecticut Department of Education, he was responsible for the development and oversight of a broad statewide program of activities in K–12 mathematics education, including the provision of technical assistance and professional development, the evaluation of programs, the assessment of student achievement and teacher competency, the dissemination of information, and the coordination of programs and activities that resulted in consistently high NAEP mathematics scores.

Leinwand serves as the Principal Research Analyst, American Institutes for Research (AIR) (2002–present). He is a mathematics expert on a wide range of AIR projects that focus on high-quality mathematics instruction, turning around underperforming schools, improving adult education, evaluating programs, developing assessments, and providing technical assistance.

Leinwand has been a leader in many ways during his nearly 50-year career in mathematics education. Ironically, the best demonstrations are in his ability to push, prod, cajole, and at times coerce the community to strive for what is better. His leadership roles have included being a member of the Board of Directors of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics Board of Directors as well as its president. He held various leadership/officer roles in the Association of State Supervisors of Mathematics. Not only have his leadership roles been seen at the national level, he has served in many capacities for the Associated Teachers of Mathematics in Connecticut and the Association of Teachers of Mathematics in New England.

Leinwand’s work on advisory boards for the New Standards Project, the Connected Math Project, the Interactive Mathematics Program, Connecticut’s Common Core of Learning, the 1992 and 1996 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), and the Mathematical Sciences Education Board and its Curriculum Frameworks Task Force are prime examples of his leadership. His service does not stop with advisory boards: He has served as a co-chair of a regional NCTM meeting, on NCTM’s Assessment Task Force, and on the Principles to Actions writing team; chaired the Connecticut Committee to Study and Make Recommendations on the Development of a High School Competency-Based Certificate, and the Connecticut Common Core of Learning. In other words, Leinwand has been a tour de force in the area of service for the mathematics education world.

Steven Leinwand embodies service to the mathematics education community and has been recognized for it in his receiving the NCSM Glenn Gilbert/Ross Taylor National Leadership Award, the ETA Distinguished Service Award, and the Robert A. Rosenbaum Award.

Most who have seen Leinwand in any of the thousands of presentations at meetings of NCTM and other organizations around the world could testify to the ways in which he has helped them as they worked to change their teaching methods, approaches, and the curriculum that they use.