Bolstering UCLA’s K–12 outreach and community engagement efforts, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation has awarded a $262,355 grant to the UCLA Curtis Center for Mathematics and Teaching to support the work of Heather Dallas, the center’s executive director, and her team in expanding a successful elective math enrichment program in Los Angeles middle schools.
Since its public launch in 2022, the Curtis Center’s Applied Math Program (AMP) has trained teachers in select L.A. Unified School District schools to engage nearly 300 seventh and eighth graders, the vast majority from historically underrepresented backgrounds. The new grant supports development of a math investigation focused on financial literacy for sixth graders, rounding out a three-year sequence that will facilitate the expansion of AMP to middle schools across Los Angeles.
“A very, very small fraction of students who are at or below the poverty line get training in financial literacy,” Dallas said. “UCLA has a strong financial mathematics program, and this is an opportunity to translate what we know into something that the community can use, and that ultimately can benefit hundreds of thousands of students.”
The Curtis Center is developing the investigation with UCLA mathematics professor Georg Menz and with the L.A.-based Bridge Builders Foundation’s Wayne Moore and James Breedlove, who bring professional financial expertise as well as experience in financial literacy work with minority youth.
AMP also allows the Curtis Center, which teaches Bruin undergraduates interested in careers in K–12 mathematics education, to provide higher-quality experiential learning opportunities to these UCLA students. As the program is implemented, undergraduates can go into local schools and see new standards for teaching practice, such as inquiry-based learning, in action.
“It’s a symbiotic relationship that benefits not only the community, but also our students here at UCLA, and that’s part of what makes this funding so transformative,” Dallas said.
