Alice Cook

Cook’s “Powerful Numbers Expedition” winning project will help her Algebra II students with the analytical skills they need to conduct compelling, data-driven advocacy campaigns. The Capital City Public Charter School students, who mostly come from low-income environments, will be able to use the numeracy skills gained through this project to articulate logical positions derived through data analysis. Unique to this project is that the entire lens of the mathematics instruction will be the examination and manipulation of HIV/AIDS data pertaining to Washington, D.C.’s public health crisis. The students will choose a social issue, analyze relevant issue-related data, create a regression line to fit their data and explain the relevance of the data to contemporary society. Experts from La Clinica Del Pueblo and the Whitman-Walker Clinic will meet with students to critique and inform their work. The final product of the project will be for the students to develop a community event – a Social Justice Data Fair – to support the social cause of the class’ choosing. All 106 10^th and 11^th grade students will benefit from this program by being educated and empowered as activists as they learn Algebra II content, thus eroding the achievement gap as they gain math proficiency. Cook lives in Washington, D.C.