I just found out that one of my heroes, Bob Moses, founder of The Algebra Project, and an important leader in the civil rights movement (specif. the SNCC voter registration movement), will be speaking at NYU this afternoon, and I can’t go. GRRR. Maybe you can.
The title of the talk is:
Working the Demand Side: Mississippi, SNCC and the ’60s struggle for the Right to Vote. The Algebra Project, the Young People’s Project and the current struggle for a Quality Public School Education as a Constitutional Right.
The info:
Thursday April 7, 4:00-5:30pm
King Juan Carlos Center Auditorium (NYU)
53 Washington Square South, 1st floor
The talk is sponsored by The DOE History in the Classroom Project and NYU’s Department of Teaching and Learning. Bob will have a book signing afterward for his two books Radical Equations and Quality Education as a Constitutional Right.
I don’t have time at this second to properly introduce you to Bob Moses’ work if you aren’t already familiar with it but let me at least say that if you are interested in the relationship between math education and democracy, there isn’t a deeper thinker on the subject anywhere.
Research in Practice 
Saw him speak last year at Wellesley. He described stellar results with large numbers of geometry students over a few years. After the talk I asked him how, and he said “they have to learn to attend.” Uh, great, I thought to myself, and again asked him “How.” “They have to have a shared experience to discuss so they will learn to attend to each other. Then they can learn to attend to themselves, and [if I’m remembering this right] then to the material.”
I didn’t really get what he was talking about, but it was obvious that he know what he was talking about, so I’m hoping that over time I’ll start to see what he means.
I don’t have complete illumination for you, but in case you didn’t have this piece of context, the thing that distinguishes Bob’s approach is that he sees the project of educating as fundamentally built around investing the kids as a community in their education and organizing this community to advocate for its own education. Hence the “working the demand side” in the title of the talk. The Algebra Project also invests a lot of time, money, energy in developing curriculum, but the thing that makes the organization special is its connection to grass-roots organizing. So, that’s what I hear behind what he said to you. Maybe helpful?