It's absolutely dead outside for a payday at 33rd Street and Greenmount Avenue, as rain threatens to send everyone home earlier than usual. This crossroads is usually packed with folks shopping and flooding check-cashing spots and pawn shops on Fridays, but the elements are doing the 'hood a favor today. A few blocks away, inside the Waverly YMCA, however, a group of about 25 Baltimore City high-school students have braved the weather to occupy what's usually a day-care room.

At first glance, the kids represent various local stereotypes. There's a kid with a thick B-more drawl and gold teeth who, if he was a character in a movie, would require subtitles for the benefit of anyone not raised around him. A pregnant teen sits hunched over a laptop, head resting in palm. Many styles of braided hair on boys and girls are represented, giant polo shirts (this fall's XXXXXXL white tee, apparently) are in abundance, and one kid is leaning so far back in his chair that others become distracted by sheer amazement that he hasn't fallen yet. Most say "like," like, after every, like, three words. Some are wearing shades indoors, and when an adult enters the room, the ones sitting on the window sill quickly drop into the chairs they know they should have been sitting in to begin with.

"OK, everyone quiet down, please," Chelsea Carson begins. "Xzavier has the floor, then it'll be Chris, then Fernandez. Go ahead, Xzavier, please."

Carson, 18, is the president of the Baltimore Algebra Project. Born in the 1980s as a peer-tutorial project designed to help high-school students pass standardized math tests, the Cambridge, Mass.-based national Algebra Project has since morphed into an all-out student activism group and the local chapter is now set to evolve once more.

The immediate topic of today's meeting is a protest set to take place Dec. 4, when several civil-rights activist groups will gather on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court in anticipation of the outcome of two lawsuits, Meredith v. Jefferson County Public Schools and Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District. The court's rulings on these cases will be a factor in whether or not racial integration and equal opportunity in American education, as well as affirmative-action programs for higher education, remain legal. It's up to this room full of kids, only three of whom are of legal voting age, to decide on the best way to get down to Washington on a school day.

But the bigger issue at hand is the initiative the Algebra Project started Oct. 4: a movement to replace the Maryland State Board of Education.

Many of the kids look and sound like the same children you dread sharing a bus with. The ones whose loud expletive-filled rants about who did what on MySpace can be heard even through headphones. Or the grunions who drag their feet extra slow as they pass your car in a crosswalk, making you almost miss your light. But that's precisely the irony. These are those same kids, and this unlikely bunch may be Baltimore City schools' saviors.

From her full frame to her "everyone, please quiet down now, please" command of the room, Carson has a maternal energy. But she's still just a freshman at Baltimore City Community College with plans on transferring to Morgan State University next semester, older than her Algebra Project peers by just a few months and not that long past prom. She is as surprised at her role as would-be revolutionary leader as anyone.

"I think in the beginning, I really didn't know anything outside of what was going on inside my realm of friends," she says about life before the Algebra Project; she joined as a sophomore at City College High School. "After a while I started to learn what was going on [in the school system], and I started to feel cheated out of life. It upset me, and I decided I should be doing all I can to change that."

For a room full of teenagers who have just finished a full day of school and could surely be doing other things on a Friday evening, the group is surprisingly attentive and focused. It's an odd sight, considering how many city public school products come across. But that's why one of the goals of the Algebra Project is to re-educate the general public on the topic of the city's public school students themselves. These are not people who should be blamed for the rampant violence in the schools, or the staggering dropout rates, or the crime and jobless statistics in the city. They are victims. In fact, they are aware that they are being done a disservice by the state and city governments, and are not just clamoring for a change but demanding it.

The Baltimore Algebra Project has its roots in the civil-rights movement, through the founder of the national Algebra Project, Robert P. Moses. Moses had taken part in the movement's Freedom Summer voter-registration activities in Mississippi in 1964; by the '80s, Moses was working as a math teacher in Cambridge. He earned a reputation for taking poorly performing students and helping them to earn honors in math and science. It occurred to Moses that not only were his African-American students performing poorly in math, but they were not even expected to pass. In his 2001 book, Radical Equations, he writes that he came to believe that "the ongoing struggle for citizenship and equality for minority people is . . . linked to an issue of math and science literacy."

The Algebra Project began in 1982 as tutoring sessions using an experimental pedagogy to teach mathematical theories. The agenda soon expanded to encourage community organization and youth empowerment, as well as math literacy. Since then, the Algebra Project has spread to Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, and other cities.

In 1999, a group of Baltimore high-school students who had attended Stadium Middle School began tutoring Stadium students in math as a Baltimore chapter of the Algebra Project. The program was the basic peer-tutoring program with the optional advocacy committee available to those interested. What started as a handful of students working out of a Stadium School classroom soon grew to include more than 120 tutors serving at least 200 students throughout the city, as well as a fiery activist core.

Because the Baltimore Algebra Project is technically a tutoring program, the Baltimore City Public School System funds about half of its budget--$140,000 for the `06-'07 school year. Many students are drawn to the program strictly for help with their homework, and many tutors sign up largely for the $10 an hour they are paid; the activism portion of the organization is optional and is not subsidized by state funds. Still, some enthusiastic students take advantage of the organization and its activism component to look into local politics and participate in what they believe to be a righteous cause.

When the Baltimore City Public School System faced a huge and unexplained budget shortfall during the 2003-'04 school year, the Algebra Project students organized mass rallies. They also took their protest to the courts along with Bradford vs. Maryland State Board of Education.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed Bradford in 1994 in regard to the state's failure to provide adequate funding to Baltimore City students as required by the state constitution. Low test scores and graduation rates were cited as reasons for the suit, as well as then-Gov. Parris Glendening's Thornton Commission on school funding, which found in '93 that "educating a poor child requires approximately $2,000 more per child to eliminate barriers to success."

In 2000, Judge Joseph H. Kaplan ruled that the education being provided to Baltimore City public-school students was constitutionally inadequate, and that it would take an additional $200 million to $260 million from the state each year to bring it up to par. The state appealed Kaplan's ruling, then withdrew its appeal.

The state is now paying up, but slowly. So the Algebra Project students organized several major actions, including rallies, marches, strikes, and civil disobedience activities in an attempt to put pressure on the state to comply with Judge Kaplan's ruling.

For Algebra Project activists, the inequities and underfunding they face in Baltimore City schools isn't a matter of abstract legalese. When Chris Goodman, a sharp and well-spoken 18-year-old Algebra Project organizer, was a sophomore at City College, he made an open-house visit to Baltimore County's Eastern Technical High School in Essex.

"I saw that they had a whole student catering program, two gyms, more and better books in the library, and I thought to myself, This is a real school," he recalls. "I was being told that City College was one of the best [high schools] in the country. That just really opened my eyes to what's going on, and I knew I had to be a part of making that change."

The latest step toward making that change involved following the lead of Bob Moses' long-ago role in Freedom Summer. On Oct. 14, the Baltimore Algebra Project, with the support of the local NAACP and other activist groups, gathered near Greenmount Cemetery to launch what it's calling Freedom Fall, an educational-rights movement.

The Algebra Project members did this by establishing what they are calling the Maryland Freedom Board of Education, based on their finding that Article 6 of the declaration of rights in the Maryland Constitution states that:

All persons invested with the Legislative or Executive powers of Government are the Trustees of the Public, and, as such, accountable for their conduct: Wherefore, whenever the ends of Government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the People may, and of right ought, to reform the old, or establish a new Government; the doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.

In the spring of 2004, fueled by the city school system's budget crisis, members of the Baltimore Algebra Project testified at a joint hearing of federal and state courts on the state's noncompliance with Bradford that that they had exhausted every possible recourse to resolve the problem of school funding.

Judge Kaplan allowed the students to testify before the city school board about its Bradford beef on May 15. The students were then told to work with the state, the city school system, and the original Bradford plaintiffs. The suit was named after parent Keith Bradford, one of the group of people consolidated into the suit by the ACLU. None of the parties worked directly with the Algebra Project members, however, though the Bradford plaintiffs did speak with the students over the phone.

On July 21, students again testified in court and announced that if the state did not comply with Kaplan's ruling by Sept. 1, they would launch Freedom Fall, take advantage of Article 6, and mount a challenge to the very legitimacy of the State Board of Education itself.

It's still not clear how the Algebra Project's challenge is going to play out--as a practical maneuver or symbolic gesture.

"Its role, as I see it, is to be the legitimate board for the students of Baltimore City," says Thomas Nikundiwe, a Harvard University graduate student working toward a doctoral degree. Asked about his role in the Algebra Project, he says, "I have worked with the students since 2004. I was working as a math literacy youth organizer, a position which is the brainchild of Bob Moses and has been since developed in the Baltimore context by myself and others."

Nikundiwe is one of the Algebra Project's many local adult supporters, including Hassan Allen-Giordano of the Youth Liberation Movement, Farajii Muhammad of the New Light Leadership Coalition, and Betty Robinson of Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, who acknowledge that they help guide the kids by offering advice and generally nudging them in the right direction. But they insist they are not organizers, making it clear that the Algebra Project is a youth-run organization. Of the several Algebra Project meetings attended by City Paper, many of them unannounced visits or visits arranged at the last minute, there was only an adult present, sitting quietly in the background, on one occasion.

Nikundiwe sums up his input as follows: "If the students seek my advice, I will give it, and I trust that they will analyze it and make decisions based on all the information they have available."

Nonetheless, adult intervention is at the root of the student activists' formation of the Maryland Freedom Board of Education. "We got an e-mail from one of our adult allies about Article 6 last spring" Goodman recalls. Frustration gave birth to a wild idea hatched by the group, who, angered by the state's inaction, considered taking over the state school board by occupying its offices. "We wanted to know what would happen if we did that," Goodman continues. "We did some research and found out that Article 6 gives citizens the right to resist oppression, then we studied it and went forward."

The Freedom Board is still working to define itself and its role in the ongoing tussle over the city schools and the state's funding of them, but already has gained recognition from the Baltimore City Council. The City Council recognized the Freedom Board in an Oct. 30 resolution, which acknowledged the board of Education for "the purpose of inviting members of the Maryland Freedom Board of Education to share with the City Council and the general public information on the genesis of the organization, the specific funding and programmatic goals to achieve parity in public education throughout Maryland, the action plan for achieving the goals of the Board, and plans for the future advocacy agenda of the grass-roots organization."

But it is the end, and not the means, that matters most. The goal remains to take back a sum of $1.08 billion in Bradford-mandated undistributed funds from the state in order to hire more teachers, create smaller class rooms, and refurbish older buildings, and the Algebra Project activists are serious about that achieving that goal, and agitating until they do. During the Oct. 14 march, they handed out fliers that read the students are not pawns in ehrlich and o'malley's game. Some of the students carried believe posters with a giant red "X" marking out the word.

"I didn't think I was a radical or revolutionary person until I got here," Chelsea Carson says. "I knew about the civil-rights movement and all that, I learned about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X--being in school you learn a little--but I didn't hear much about Nat Turner and Marcus Garvey or Bob Moses. I wouldn't have heard about any of that if I didn't come [to the Algebra Project]." She adds, "I would've been aspiring to be a fashion designer. Now I want to be a politician."

Many Algebra Project students share a similar political awakening with Carson and have high hopes that their efforts will bring about tangible changes. Many Algebra Project members, however, are just excited to be involved in something. Carson, Goodman, and others seem like levelheaded kids who, even if they hadn't become young activists, would have still been college-bound. Adrian Washington is another story.

"They call me Ace," Washington says by way of introduction. Polite and cordial, he still smacks of Baltimore 'hood, four-sizes-too-big hooded sweatshirt and all. At 16, he's also already the owner of memories that people twice his age would call nightmares.

"I'm supposed to be a junior in high school. I'm a sophomore, though," he says with subdued remorse as fellow Algebra Project members drink ice tea and snack on chips in a Charles Street office. "I been put out of a couple schools. One was for violence, one was for academics. I was basically running the streets, and after a while I realized I need to get myself an education so I could get out of Baltimore." He was introduced to the Algebra Project two years ago while a student at Heritage High School.

"It started just as something to get me out the streets and do something with myself," Washington says. "At first it was just like, I'm here. I wasn't even paying attention. I just thought I would come through, listen to a few words, and leave. I was considered illiterate because of my grades. I'm not illiterate, I'm a smart person, it's just that I been in the streets a lot. I was going to school like three times a month, I was in the streets, basically riding around on bikes trying to `move things,' getting beat up by knockers, just stupid stuff. I was 14. A lot of the people I was around was 18 and older, some grown folks, too."

Washington's voice takes a more emotional tone: "It makes me so mad that some of the people that I was around was just as smart and smarter than me, but they can't get out the streets. A lot of them come from families that do illegal things, and got them into it. And they can't get away. It's the money. I know me, personally, I could put down two G's in about three weeks. I was helping my family, putting food in people's mouth. There's too much money in the street, that's why nobody leaves."

But Washington did leave the streets behind and now finds himself working alongside Donald Phillips, 17, who introduces himself as "a senior, 4.0 average." Phillips attends Cherry Hill's New Era Academy, a former charter-turned-public school, and already has his acceptance letter to Morgan State, where he plans to major in civil engineering. His mother just received her bachelor's degree this year, and his father is attending college. Even though he comes off as the class clown of the bunch today, Phillips is well aware that there's nothing funny about the work the Algebra Project is trying to do.

"Generally speaking, when it comes to Baltimore, you have to find extra confidence just to keep going with whatever you doing," Phillips says. "Because whenever you try do something positive or even different there's always going to be people who are hating or people that want to hurt you because you doing something different.

"When I was in elementary school, my parents told me that most of the kids I know that are doing negative things are going to be dead or in jail, and all the kids that are positive are going to keep moving up with you and you'll see them all the time," Phillips continues. "And I recognize it now. I know some kids I could have chose to be with and act like are in jail, and I know three that are dead. One died the other day--he was 13."

The Algebra Project members paint a bleak picture of growing up in a city where you feel like you've been forgotten about, feeling like your education is not worth your government's time and effort, and then having to endure social ridicule for wanting to better yourself. Washington says the plight of the school system is one of the reasons he and many of his West Baltimore neighbors don't bother to go in the first place.

Washington and Phillips may share memories of losing friends in their early teens to street violence, but now they attend meetings and study together and, like many of the other kids, consider the Algebra Project a second home. And it's not all math problems and social ills; the students share rides to movies and other events as well. Whether or not the Baltimore Algebra Project has a hand in transforming the city's school system, it is already making a difference.

It's hard to deny the social and academic benefits of the Algebra Project, but not everyone is as thrilled about its activism. "While it's terrific that a group of young people are excited about education to the point where they would organize themselves in this manner, and take initiative and research their options to this point, turning over a sum of money that they're requesting would just be imprudent for everyone involved," says Maryland State Board of Education Vice President Dunbar Brooks.

Nick Stewart, a representative from Mayor Martin O'Malley's office, echoes Brooks' somewhat patronizing tone, if not his opinion. "The mayor applauds the students of the Algebra Project for their passion and commitment to Baltimore's schools," Stewart says. "Governor-elect O'Malley is committed to continuing the progress we have seen over the last few years by fully funding Thornton, including the Governor's Council on Integrity and Efficiency increasing school construction dollars, and working to make college education more affordable for Maryland families."

From the mayor's office to the classrooms to the state school board itself, the consensus seems to be that it's awesome to see kids take initiative, but they are in no way prepared to deal with taking over a branch of government. And yet the graduation rate remains 38 percent, according to the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center. If the responsible adults charged with running the schools aren't doing the job properly, why not give someone else a shot?

None of the members of the Baltimore Algebra Project is sure how this will all end up, and some seem surprised that it's gone this far. But whether or not the Freedom School Board ever takes its hoped-for seats, the Algebra Project isn't going anywhere.

Chris Goodman will be going to University of Maryland in January to major in business and minor in political science. Yet he plans to make the trek back to Baltimore as often as his new college schedule will allow to continue his work with the group. "The ultimate goal is still to build up math skills in the cities and continue to strive forward nationally," he says. "In Baltimore, the push is to attain adequate [school] funding is a civil and human right.

"I think that if more people talked about the Algebra Project or other organizations, people would take notice and think about why things should change," Goodman continues. "But a key element is education, because I don't think enough people know that people have the power, not the politicians. Then people would understand what they need to do to help make change."

The sight of a group of teenagers fighting the government for money to fix schools most of them are a year or two away from graduating from has got to be a motivation to someone.

"I just want things to be better here" Goodman says, before switching into firebrand mode. "If every student and parent knew what the Black Panthers stood for, the Cuban Revolution, the fight against apartheid in South Africa, nobody would be walking around with their head down like things are out of our hands. They would understand that we're going to have to fight to get what we want."