Jay Gillen has taught and organized in and around Baltimore City Public Schools since 1987. In 1994, after a 2-year organizing campaign, he became teacher-director of the first community-controlled public middle school in Baltimore in many years. Working with graduates of the school, Gillen developed the peer-tutoring and youth activist agenda of the Baltimore Algebra Project (BAP). He is currently helping to design youth-led math research centers and to develop a peer-to-peer youth enterprise incubator. Gillen is the author of Educating for Insurgency: The Roles of Young People in Schools of Poverty and The Power in the Room: Radical Education through Youth Organizing and Employment.
