By Doug Miller

Here’s the rap on hip-hop as a teaching tool. It works.

Just ask D.J. Duey, a 29-year-old rapping math teacher who’s on a leave of absence from Adams Middle School in Westland, Mich., just outside of Detroit. After seventh-grade algebra students were exposed to one of his original rap songs on point plotting, their test scores showed a marked improvement.

“I use my music to show that it’s cool to be educated,” said Duey, who spoke to The Defenders Online during a recent road trip from Detroit to Atlanta, where he was scheduled to get kids pumped up about education at a local elementary school. “They instantly relate to it.”

Duey, who hosts a rap-education website, www.mrduey.com, says his own enjoyment of rap music began when he himself was a fifth-grader. “I really got into the hip-hop scene,” he remembers. “The music just struck a chord with me.” As part of a student-teaching project following his graduation from Eastern Michigan University, he brought his hobby to school, composing and recording a rap song about measurements for second-graders. Duey said their teacher gave each of them a CD, and after listening to it every one of them got an “A” on the next test.

As a substitute teacher in a suburban Detroit middle school, Duey sat in on faculty meetings to get a sense of what the full-time teachers were facing – discipline problems, disengaged students – and produced a complete hip-hop CD addressing science, language arts, math and social studies. It even included a song about Martin Luther King, Jr.

Power to the Pupils

Duey says he thinks classroom rap “builds self-esteem in the students. The more educated you become, the more power you have.” And part of that power seems to manifest itself as higher grades. Here’s what one education professor on Duey’s website feedback page has to say: “Teachers from all over the U.S. representing diverse cultural, ethnic and social-economic status testify that Duey’s music has profoundly increased academic achievement, as well as greatly decreased discipline problems.”

How? Marcella Runell Hall, associate director of New York University’s Center for Multicultural Education and Programs and author of The Hip-hop Education Guidebook, says that, on one level, the music gets students to show up. “Students are disengaged,” Hall contends. “That is our biggest problem.” With rap music, she says, “the content typically is very compelling.”

One a second level, Hall explains, “the emphasis on beats is really conducive to memorization.” That can make hip-hop an especially useful tool in teaching word problems, geometry and algebra.

Hall, 35, says she too has been a lifelong fan of hip-hop. The music emerged out of the Civil Rights Movement, she recalled, and addressed many profound issues, including race and cultural differences. “It influenced a lot of how I saw the world.”

Hall and others caution that over the long run, rap certainly won’t turn out to be the best or only way to fix the multitude of problems facing the American education system, but for the present “it’s something that can be used right now.” It can be an effective tool, Hall says, although “we need resources and training seminars” to give teachers a push in the right direction if they want to use it.

Doug Miller is a writer living in Westchester County, New York.