Counted Out: Movie Review

This past December, I attended a screening of Counted Out, a film that highlights the importance of mathematical literacy to understand and solve the challenges of today’s data-driven world.

The film centers on the ideas of a personal inspiration of mine, Bob P. Moses, the late Civil Rights leader and math educator. Moses was known for his work in the Civil Rights movement as a community organizer, helping black people register to vote in Mississippi during the 1960s. He turned his focus to supporting black and other underserved children by founding the Algebra Project — an organization focused on equitable learning experiences and outcomes in mathematics. Moses’s approach included teaching algebra in a manner meaningful to students, similar to the kind of education he provided his own children. The details of his community-based activism on voting rights and education are chronicled in his 2001 book, Radical Equations. In an interview with the Washington Post, Moses told a reporter, that just “being able to read and write will no longer be enough to make it in this fast-paced knowledge economy...Math literacy will be a liberation tool for people trying to get out of poverty and the best hope for people trying not to get left behind.”

While Moses and his legacy are the heartbeat of the film, Counted Out focuses primarily on why math literacy is essential for making sense of today's world — where understanding quantative data is an urgent requirement. It is a call to action: engaging students (and ourselves) in recognizing mathematics as a tool for civic and social engagement. I highly recommend everyone see it.