Education Week - March 3, 2021 - 12

Former professional football player John Urschel,
the author of the New York Times bestseller Mind
and Matter: A Life in Math and Football, is making
it his mission to encourage more students of color
to enter STEM fields.

In a conversation with Assistant Managing Editor Kevin Bushweller and other reporters and editors at Education Week, Urschel talked about his journey from being
a student whose 1st grade teacher initially misjudged his
intellectual abilities and wanted to hold him back a year
to a PhD candidate at one of the nation's top universities,
tackling the highest levels of mathematics.
Following are some of the key insights from that conversation, edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: In your book, you write about a situation when you

Listen to
mathematician John
Urschel talk about
building confidence in
math, setting the right
levels of difficulty, and
learning team skills.

were in 1st grade in which your teacher wanted to hold
you back a grade because she saw you as a " typical
minority student unable to keep up in a classroom
setting. " Yet when your mother insisted the school
test your knowledge and skills, you were way ahead
of your peers. How often do you think minority
students face similarly biased assumptions?

edw.link/
JohnUrschelSTEM
National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath)

How to Get More
Students of Color
Into STEM
Tackle bias, expand resources

T
by

Kevin
Bushweller

he numbers are troubling. Only 7 percent
of the people who earn STEM degrees are
Black, according to the most recent federal
data. That percentage did not change much
at all between 2008 and 2018, but it did rise
from 7 to 12 percent for Hispanic college graduates.
In the working world, the percentage of Black people
working in the fields of science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics drops even lower. Bottom line: There
are very few STEM role models for students of color.
John Urschel is trying to change that reality through his
own personal story and by talking to high school students
of color around the country. Urschel, who is Black, is a former professional football player for the Baltimore Ravens
and the author of Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and
Football, which made the New York Times Bestseller list.
On track to wrap up a PhD in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this spring, Urschel is
determined to get more students of color interested and
achieving in STEM fields, especially math. While at MIT,
he has been involved in the school's MathROOTS program, which works to encourage more females and students of color who are in high school to pursue studies and
careers in STEM fields.

12 | EDUCATION WEEK | March 3, 2021 | www.edweek.org

Certainly more often than I would like. I visit a good
amount of schools. I typically try to aim for the high school
level. Even talking to parents of children in high school,
they tell me these [similar] stories of when their kids were
younger. It's important that when we look at a student that
we really try to diagnose what their situation is based off
the characteristics of what they're doing, not things like
the color of their skin or the household they're born into.
When I was growing up, one of the most important
things to my mother was that whatever I wanted to do,
whatever I wanted to be, whatever I really desired, she
really wanted to make sure that the only thing that could
ever, ever hold me back would be a lack of talent, whatever
talent means, a lack of work ethic, or just plain bad luck.
She really was very adamant that she never wanted it to
be because of the household I was born into, or a lack of
resources.
Q: Over time, you developed real confidence in your

math skills. What message should educators be
sending to all students, and especially to students
of color, to build that kind of confidence?

I would say specifically in mathematics and STEM, one
thing that is really important but somehow doesn't really
come across as I would like it to, is that whatever you are
doing in math, wherever you are at in math, you are at a
given place. And that place you are at, meaning what you
know and what you don't, doesn't say anything about your
intelligence level or your ability to do math, and that getting better in math and in quantitative things takes work,
it takes time.
Q: What matters most in building that confidence?
What really matters is resources, what really matters is
how much a child is nurtured and fed things. This is just

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Education Week - March 3, 2021

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