After all, her dad said, her true passion is social justice.  

McChristian said the explanation was simple: A lack of access and opportunity in mathematics for all students means many children, particularly kids of color and those living in impoverished communities, are forced to take educational pathways that leave them unqualified for lucrative STEM careers. 

“The role of math in educational equity is really a civil rights — and a social justice and racial justice — issue,” she recalled telling him. 

Broken down that way, friends and family quickly understood why the national policy director role at made sense for the Yale University and Columbia Law School graduate. 

And, its focus on education conjures an old love: McChristian, who holds a master’s degree in early childhood education from the University of Nevada, was once a member of which recruits college graduates to work in high-need schools for two years. McChristian was a Head Start teacher in the Las Vegas Valley. 

But it was an even earlier experience that drew her to the field, she said. Her father, also a Yale grad, worked for IBM and moved his family frequently when McChristian was a child, allowing her to attend schools in several locations, including Japan. 

McChristian, who was born in California but lived all over the East Coast, said the constant relocation created a unique opportunity to observe educational inequity firsthand, both here and abroad. 

“In Tokyo, I was trying to catch up with students at my expat school,” she said. “And then, a year later, I was in Raleigh, North Carolina, reading a textbook to another student in the 7th grade who didn’t know how to read. So that spurred me to want to understand why there are these disparities.”

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

What do you see as the purpose of your new position? 

There’s a disconnect between the people who live and breathe this work and everyday community members. My entire career has been about breaking down these concepts and these ideas that really impact people’s lives into actionable steps that they can take to change their communities. I’m excited to bring that kind of perspective to the math equity landscape.

What do you see as some of the biggest challenges that we as a nation face in moving kids forward in math?

A lot of times when you just say the word math, people’s minds shut off. They go quickly to, “Oh, I’m not a math person,” or “Math isn’t relevant to me.” They don’t even want to talk about the ideas around why that might be. Maybe they didn’t have access to math coursework that was relevant to their experience, that was culturally responsive. Did they have all the options for the coursework that would get them to the career or the path they wanted to have?

It’s been difficult, but it’s also been invigorating in many ways because it shows me the opportunities for me to add value. I can list why this is a racial and social justice issue. I can show what this means for the average high school student if they don’t have access to math that speaks to them and how that sets them up for their future career.

Historically, what have we been doing wrong in terms of math instruction?

For many, many years, we’ve had this traditional math sequencing without fail, where you go from Algebra I all the way up to calculus — if you’re able to. And that is still an extremely important pathway as calculus is kind of a soft requirement for highly selective colleges. 

But we know some students want computer science or data science instead. These kinds of courses may be more relevant to what they want to do in college — and for their future careers. 

We’re not saying do away with any certain model. We’re saying, make sure students have as many options as possible in terms of math coursework they need to succeed. It’s about adding more to the plate, giving students more resources. 

What would you like to change about how mathematics is taught today? 

First is the traditional sequence, the ending point of calculus for those students who want to go into STEM. We need more options there, additional pathways that can include data science and stats.

Then, once we get to the college admissions stage, we want to make sure colleges — including the more highly selective institutions — reflect this change. Because it’s not helpful if a high school can say, “Oh, now our students can take data science to complete their graduation requirement,” but the university those students want to attend does not factor that into the admissions process.

And then, once students get to college, we want to make sure they have access to other coursework — just as they did in high school — that may be more relevant to their experience. 

How will the Trump administration’s plans for NAEP impact the information we collect regarding student achievement? 

We are a nonpartisan . But I will say we have been very intentional about the push for the continuation of data. Data such as the Nation’s Report Card provides us with an assessment of where our kids are.

How will the defunding of Head Start impact students’ later achievement in mathematics?

At Just Equations, we focus primarily on the high school to college pathway. But as a former Head Start teacher, I feel very passionately about the work that can be done to support students’ social-emotional, literacy and math needs at the early childhood education level.

Why is it important to solve this issue? To bring more students into mathematics? 

For me, it’s informed by my family experience. My dad grew up in South Central Los Angeles and through a program called , he was able to attend a high- performing high school and then go on to Yale University. He had so many opportunities presented to him that he never would if it had not been for this.

My dad always told me, “There’s not a lack of talent, there’s a lack of opportunity.” And so that’s what really fortifies me in this space to ensure that every student, that Black student, that Latinx student, has access to the coursework they need to go into a STEM career. 

So that’s why I go back to it being a racial and social justice issue. We can’t afford for people to tune out of the math conversation as we have these new digital technologies emerge, as we see more of our world go online, as we see technologies to target communities of color.

Disclosure: The Gates Foundation provides financial support to Just Equations and to ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

Like learning to read by third grade, taking eighth grade math is a pivotal moment in a child’s education. Students who pass Algebra 1 in eighth grade are more likely to sign up for more advanced math courses, and those who pass more advanced math courses are more likely to graduate from college and earn more money. “Algebra in eighth grade is a gateway to a lot of further opportunities,” said Dan Goldhaber, an economist who studies education at the American Institutes for Research, in a recent webinar.

Researchers are trying to understand why so few Black and Hispanic students and low-income students of all races are making it through this early gate. While 25 percent of white students passed algebra in eighth  grade in 2021, only 13 percent of Black students did, according to the most recent .

A collection of surveys of teachers and principals, conducted by the research organization RAND, suggests three problems at the poorest middle schools, which are disproportionately populated with Black and Hispanic students. Many don’t offer algebra at all. Their teachers have less training and math expertise, and they describe how they spend classroom time differently than teachers do at wealthier schools. That means the most advanced students at many middle schools in poor communities don’t have the opportunity to learn algebra, and many students at high-poverty schools aren’t receiving the kind of math lessons that could help them get ready for the subject. 

In 2023 and 2024, RAND surveyed more than 3,000 school principals and almost 1,000 math teachers across the country. The educators are part of a specially constructed national sample, designed to reflect all public schools and the demographics of the U.S. student population. A  analyzing some of the survey findings was released in October 2024. (That analysis was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)

The poorest 25 percent of schools had vastly different course offerings and teachers than the wealthiest 25 percent. Most strikingly, nearly a quarter of the highest poverty schools didn’t offer algebra at all to any eighth graders, compared with only 6 percent of the wealthiest schools. 

Conversely, poor schools are much less likely to adopt an algebra-for-all policy in eighth grade. Nearly half of the wealthiest schools offered algebra to all of their eighth grade students, regardless of math ability, compared with about a third of the poorest schools. 

Math teachers at high-poverty schools tended to have weaker professional preparation. They were far more likely to have entered the profession without first earning a traditional education degree at a college or university, instead completing an alternative certification program on the job, often without student teaching under supervision. And they were less likely to have a graduate degree or hold a mathematics credential. 

In surveys, a third of math teachers at high-poverty schools reported that they spent more than half of class time teaching topics that were below grade level, as well as managing student behavior and disciplining students. Lecture-style instruction, as opposed to classroom discussion, was far more common at the poorest schools compared to the wealthiest schools. RAND researchers also detected similar discrepancies in instructional patterns when they examined schools along racial and ethnic lines, with Black and Hispanic students receiving “less optimal” instruction than white students. But these discrepancies were stronger by income than by race, suggesting that poverty may be a bigger factor than bias.

Many communities have tried putting more eighth graders into algebra classes, but that has sometimes left unprepared students worse off.  “Simply giving them an eighth grade algebra course is not a magic bullet,” said AIR’s Goldhaber, who commented on the RAND analysis during a Nov. 5 . Either the material is too challenging and the students fail or the course was “algebra” in name only and didn’t really cover the content. And without a college preparatory track of advanced math classes to take after algebra, the benefits of taking Algebra 1 in eighth grade are unlikely to accrue.

It’s also not economically practical for many low-income middle schools to offer an Algebra 1 course when only a handful of students are advanced enough to take it. A teacher would have to be hired even for a few students and those resources might be more effectively spent on something else that would benefit more students. That puts the most advanced students at low-income schools at a particular disadvantage. “It’s a difficult issue for schools to tackle on their own,” said Goldhaber. 

Improving math teacher quality at the poorest schools is a critical first step. Some researchers have suggested paying strong math teachers more to work at high-poverty schools, but that would also require the renegotiation of union contracts in many cities. And, even with financial incentives, there is a shortage of math teachers. 

For students, AIR’s Goldhaber argues the time to intervene in math is in elementary school to make sure more low-income students have strong basic math skills. “Do it before middle school,” said Goldhaber. “For many students, middle school is too late.”

The is a short take about interesting academic work.

Math teachers who believe women no longer face discrimination tend to be biased against girls’ ability in math. This is what we found through an with over 400 elementary and middle school math teachers across the United States. Our findings were published in a peer-reviewed article that appeared in April 2023 in the International Journal of STEM Education.

For our experiment, we asked teachers to evaluate a set of student solutions to math problems. The teachers didn’t know that gender- and race-specific names, such as Tanisha and Connor, had been randomly assigned to the solutions. We did this so that if they evaluated identical student work differently, it would be because of the gender- and race-specific names they saw, not the differences in student work. The idea was to see if the teachers had any unconscious biases.

After the teachers evaluated the student solutions, we asked a series of questions about their beliefs and experiences. We asked if they felt society had achieved gender equality. We asked them whether they felt anxious about doing math. We asked whether they felt students’ ability in math was fixed or could be improved. We also asked teachers to think about their own experience as math students and to report how frequently they experienced feelings of unequal treatment because of their race or gender.

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We then investigated if these beliefs and experiences were related to how they evaluated the math ability of students of different genders or racial groups.

Consistent with our , we found that implicit bias against girls arises in ambiguous situations — in this case, when student solutions were not completely correct.

Further, for teachers who believed that U.S. society had achieved gender equality, they tended to rate a student’s ability higher when they saw a male student name than when they saw a female student name for the same student work.

Why it matters

Teachers’ unconscious in math classes have been documented repeatedly.

Our study identifies factors that underlie such biases; namely, that biases are stronger among teachers who believe that gender discrimination is not a problem in the United States. Understanding the relationship between teachers’ beliefs and biases can help teacher educators create effective and targeted interventions to remove such biases from classrooms.

Our findings also shed light on potential reasons that and even when they’re not high performers.

What still isn’t known

One big remaining question is how to create targeted interventions to help teachers overcome such biases. Evidence suggests that unconscious biases . Further, research suggests that these unconscious biases can be suppressed only when people are aware of them and motivated to restrain them.

Since bias may take on different forms in different fields, a one-time, one-size-fits-all anti-bias training . We think it’s worthwhile to investigate if it’s more effective to provide implicit bias training programs that are specific to the areas where bias is revealed.

, Associate Professor of Education, ; , Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology, , and , Professor of Economics and Education Policy,

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