Our Story & Impact
The Start: At a Title I school on the southside of San Antonio, an AP® Stats teacher threw out his curriculum and made lessons on topics his students actually cared about: gerrymandering, medicine, online dating, sports, and more. That year, in a region where traditionally 2% of students passed the AP® exam, 42% of his students passed.
The Growth: The teacher created skewthescript.org and posted the lessons online for free. Within weeks, thousands of teachers across the country were using them. Now, Skew The Script is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that offers free, nonpartisan, genuinely relevant math lessons for Algebra 1, Algebra 2, and AP® Statistics.
The Impact: Several years after Skew The Script started, a Harvard research group found evidence that the curriculum produced a causal effect in AP® Stats scores across Texas, boosting AP® Exam pass rates 10-11 percentage points. This is the first-ever research of curricula showing causal improvement for scores in AP® Stats - a course that’s been offered in U.S. high schools for almost 30 years.
Our Mission
We support instruction and create high school lesson materials that make math what it already is: relevant. Why? Because relevant math classrooms…
Empower marginalized students by boosting math engagement and achievement.
Strengthen civil discourse by deepening all students’ math reasoning on civic topics.
Our Reach
Teachers
20,000
Students
400,000
Lesson Downloads
300,000
Lesson Video Views
1 Million
Page Views
2.5 Million
Our Approach
No one cares about the time it takes to fill up a swimming pool of a certain volume. No one cares about the correlation between hand width and height. No one cares, genuinely cares, about the contexts that fill the pages of most traditional math curricula. The result: Students disengage. They learn math at a shallow level. Worst of all, they leave school unprepared to apply quantitative reasoning to the complex problems of the real world. We decided to change that.
We make lessons that are …
Genuinely Relevant: Our lessons tackle compelling problems with real implications. The math isn’t a side-show. Rather, the math helps students gain genuine insight into the compelling topics that our lessons cover.
Usable: The lessons are well-chunked and aligned with state standards, making them fit easily into most classrooms.
Nonpartisan: Our goal is to heighten students’ discourse and reasoning as citizens - not to impose beliefs on them. Lessons are reviewed by a committee of politically diverse math teachers for balance and fairness.