Alfredo
Mathew III

I created this curriculum because my country is in trouble. Not because we lack resources or intelligence — but because we've lost the ability to speak across our differences. We've forgotten that we share a common argument. That the tension we're living inside has a history. That we've been here before.

I am a product of that tension. My mother's family arrived from Newcastle, England around 1650 — Protestant, serious, built for endurance. My father's family came from Bayamón, Puerto Rico in 1925 — colonized, resilient, carrying that particular rage that comes from being told your labor is welcome but your voice is not. They met at Hunter College in 1969. I was born from that meeting. I have never fully belonged to either world, and that has been my education.

My father, Alfredo Mathew Jr., was a history teacher, a South Bronx principal, and the first Puerto Rican superintendent of New York City schools. He believed in the promise of this country and spent his life trying to make its institutions accountable to all of its people.

I left the classroom 12 years ago because I wanted to understand how the economy really works.

At the time, I had already spent more than a decade teaching history in the public high schools of New York City and California. My children were young. My wife was a social worker. And like so many families in the Bay Area, we were being pushed from place to place by rising rents and a growing sense that hard work alone was no longer enough.

I wanted more economic agency. And the educator in me has always believed that if I learn something today, I can teach it tomorrow.

That journey eventually led me to become a serial entrepreneur — founding ventures, building economic ecosystems for communities the mainstream economy had decided to leave out, and eventually launching SPCC.1, the world's first Shared Prosperity Community Corporation.

I spent 14 years in public school classrooms — founding a high school in the South Bronx, teaching AP and IB History in Pasadena, teaching U.S. History in Oakland. Then another decade building economic infrastructure for communities that the mainstream economy had decided to leave out. A TEDx talk that reached 100,000 people. A venture fund that closed $24 million and incubated more than 700 businesses. SPCC.1 — a new kind of economic infrastructure designed to help communities consolidate small businesses, deliver shared services, and access multi-million dollar contracts and growth capital.

Work that confirmed what the classroom had already taught me: political democracy without economic agency is incomplete. That the argument the founders started is still going. That most people are living inside it without the language to name what they're experiencing.

I built this curriculum to give them that language.

This project starts from a simple premise: we cannot understand politics without economics, and we cannot understand economics without power.

For too long, we have taught young people to sort the world across a flat left-right spectrum, while missing deeper questions:

• Where should power sit?
• Who decides?
• Who benefits?
• And to whom is power accountable?

Economic Democracy offers a different framework. It maps American history as an ongoing argument about public vs. private power, democratic accountability vs. elite control. It brings together 250 voices, one for every year of the American experiment, from 1776 to 2026.

This is not a curriculum that tells students what to think. It is a curriculum that asks them to think more rigorously, write more honestly, and engage more seriously with the tensions at the center of our national life.

We are living through a low point in American democracy. Economic anxiety is high. Trust is low. Many people feel stuck, disoriented, and alienated from one another.

But we have been here before.

American history is not the story of a nation that avoided crisis. It is the story of a nation that has repeatedly confronted crisis, argued its way through it, and imperfectly reinvented itself.

That is the spirit behind this project.

This is for educators on every side of the political spectrum who believe young people deserve better than certainty. It is for students who are already living inside an economic system they didn't design and weren't asked about. It is for parents, school leaders, and anyone willing to enter an argument that has been unfolding for 250 years — and is still theirs to shape.