Teacher aims to ‘empower their voices’ with math
Lessons from educator’s nonprofit reach students nationwide
Munching on pepperoni slices courtesy of the mysterious pizza scholarship fund of their teacher, Dashiell “Dash” Young-saver, just under a dozen students sat in the library of IDEA South Flores for his Advanced Placement statistics course.
It was late in January, and they were learning “intervals of confidence,” working through the same calculations that allowed Virginia Tech researchers to debunk official information and expose the water crisis in Flint, Mich., in 2015.
The IDEA students determined that the sample size officials had used was too small to yield valid findings. Then, working in groups, they used a database of random samples of water tested in Flint homes to estimate a percentage that had high levels of lead.
As each estimate was shared with the class, all of them much higher than Flint officials had acknowledged, the students expressed more and more astonishment.
Many had signed up for the supplemental, afterschool course because Young-saver had a reputation for making math relevant to young people. Learning to “empower their voices using the language of math” is built into his lessons, he said.
The one about Flint has been accessed by 40,000 students online this semester through the nonprofit that Young-saver founded, called Skew the Script. Altogether, some 400,000 students nationwide have used the materials.
“We analyze the data in a sober, nonpartisan way that spurs really important, engaging conversations but that doesn’t necessarily endorse any sort of viewpoint over another,” he said. “Ideally what we’re doing is
we’re helping create and develop a citizenry who can do the same thing.”
Young-saver first developed the idea at Burbank High School in the San Antonio Independent School District, where he arrived in 2017 to work under Teach for America — an organization that still backs him by paying for that pizza.
Now 28, he grew up north of Los Angeles and came to the classroom at Burbank directly from Harvard University to find half the students had their heads on their desks, falling asleep when he tried to teach statistics.
He didn’t blame them. Many were from low-income backgrounds, dealing with “very real adult problems,” some of them holding down jobs, Young-saver said. And the math problems were contrived, irrelevant and boring.
“One day I came in, after being sick of this, with no lesson prepared, and asked my students, ‘What is it that you all really want to learn about?’ ” he said.
His students responded with a range of topics, some political, some not: Food deserts from a lack of grocery stores. The Spurs’ chance of winning the NBA finals. Online dating. Young-saver began making data sets to explore the topics.
Joined by other teachers, he is still doing that with the nonprofit, taking students’ chosen topics and seeing what kind of math “falls out of them,” he said. Since 2020, they have been posting the resulting lessons for free on the website, so teachers anywhere can use them.
About 20,000 teachers across the United States now have accounts on the website, including 175 in the San Antonio area, working at traditional public school districts, charter networks and private schools. The students are the real fans. “It broke my head in high school,” said Nallely Castillo, who had Young-saver as a teacher when he worked at KIPP University Prep in 2020. Her AP stats class had the highest pass rate for its exam in the charter network’s history, Young-saver recalled.
“You go into real life outside of school and all these people on social media are screaming numbers at you,” said Castillo, who now attends the University of Texas at Austin and is helping research Spanish-to-english translation among Mexican American children.
“You’re constantly hearing a bunch of things from a bunch of different people, a bunch of different numbers, a bunch of different stats, and I think it’s really helpful now to be able to put myself in a position where I’m thinking, ‘OK, let me be unbiased about this.’ ”
That sometimes touches topics feared by teachers in the current political climate: race, policing, abortion, gerrymandering, gun control and more.
Young-saver said he has no political agenda. Even if he did, it wouldn’t be successful from a teaching point of view — his students have differing political views, so “I would immediately lose the interest of at least half my class, and I couldn’t let that happen,” he said.
In one online lesson plan, data about Planned Parenthood from a Republican congressman is presented side-by-side with a visualization of gas prices from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s Twitter account.
Both, students will find, are misleading.
Young-saver isn’t blind to the political reality of discussing Planned Parenthood in a math class. Some parents might consider it unrelated or gratuitous. He prepared a letter that teachers who use his curricula can send at the beginning of the school year, telling parents of plans to cover these subjects.
It explains that a group of educators across a spectrum of political views examine each lesson for bias before it’s offered on the website.
“One thing I always advise to teachers is ask for permission, not forgiveness,” Young-saver said. “I think if you as a teacher are very upfront with parents about your intentions not to represent a certain agenda, but rather just to get students thinking critically about real issues, parents, by and far, see the value in that.”
A still-skeptical parent will be invited to sit in on the class and usually feels comfortable with the lessons by the end of it, he said.
Young-saver has seen his students hold officials accountable at their own school districts. Two of his Burbank students identified misleading data in a slide deck at a “state of the district” report by the then-superintendent of SAISD.
One of them, Julius Cervantes, made an appointment with district officials to discuss the graph, which had a Y axis labeled from zero to 15 percent, instead of zero to 100 percent, making a 2 percent increase look much greater than it actually was.
The officials responded by offering him a central office internship analyzing data the summer before he started college.
Cervantes, 21, is now a junior at the University of Texas at San Antonio studying data science and finance and preparing for a data analysis internship at USAA. His dream is to do that kind of thing for the NBA, and he credits his high school AP stats class for giving him a leg up.
“Growing up poor and Hispanic in San Antonio, I feel like there was a lot of bias already towards me as an individual,” he said. “Statistics was another way for my escape from that bias. Like, ‘Hey, I’m not just a statistic. I could proceed through another lens and do more.’ ”
Skew the Script, whose name refers to changing expectations about low-income families, plans to publish pre-calculus lessons this summer on top of its algebra and statistics material, and it hopes to eventually include geometry.
Young-saver is working on the “sore spot” of fundraising to keep the lessons free and grow the nonprofit. It’s a realm he admits he doesn’t know much about.
But he won’t stop teaching — that would mean not being able to play the banjo for his students — and he doesn’t plan to move the organization elsewhere.
“This is a story that could only have happened in San Antonio,” Young-saver said. “It was developed not only by me, but my students at Burbank High School, from very politically diverse viewpoints, who really cared about using math to analyze issues and had this common, almost familial culture that I think speaks to the culture of our city.”