Jaylen Brown gives talk on importance of STEM education with NASA
Education — and unequal access to it — have been a focus of Boston Celtics star forward Jaylen Brown for some time, having spent much of his free time advocating for equity in the fight against systemic discrimination at one of its roots.
To that end, the Cal-Berkeley product has worked closely with a number of prominent institutions of higher learning to such an end, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard.
In a similar vein, Brown put together a presentation and chat with the scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland Tuesday that covered importance of STEM engagement with NASA solar scientist Yari Collado-Vega and engineer Kenny Harris.
Striving for STEM 🏀🔭
Join the Boston @celtics’ Jaylen Brown for a conversation about the importance of STEM engagement with two members of our team: engineer Kenny Harris and solar scientist Yari Collado-Vega.
2:15 p.m. ET TODAY (12/1): https://t.co/Ss69c9sUhH pic.twitter.com/Kr0mQ5K03m
— NASA Goddard (@NASAGoddard) December 1, 2020
If you’d like to see a sample of what the talk entailed, check out the video tweeted by Forbes Sports’ Chris Grenham embedded below.
Brown speaks about how educational access helps reproduce inequality at an institutional level, quietly maintaining a status quo that is harmful to those it excludes.
While individual workouts officially began around the NBA today, Jaylen Brown spent his afternoon discussing education, STEM engagement and educational inequality with a NASA Goddard panel. Here's a short clip: pic.twitter.com/PQYNODxTGy
— Chris Grenham (@chrisgrenham) December 1, 2020
“Two analytics — I’ll read the first one,” offered the Georgia native.
“Massachusetts is No. 1 in public education rankings in the US. The second analytic is Massachusetts is currently No. 6 in wealth disparities/incoming quality ranking in the US. What are those two stats telling you? It should jump off the page that we have resources; we have opportunity. We also have application — but who are they being applied to? Boston Public Schools ranked last in county or district in the state of Massachusetts, and there are no predominantly minority-lead districts in the top 100 in Massachusetts, at all.”
“The question again I would like to ask is — why?” asked Brown, hinting at the role of educational policies that reproduce that very inequality by failing to invest in education that meets the needs of all students.
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