Rich Calder writes for the New York Post about an interesting fact involving a key backer of New York’s socialist mayoral candidate.
The billionaire heiress who recently donated $250,000 to a super PAC supporting socialist Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign is bankrolling a national push to bring “woke math” into public schools — a twisted bid to turn kids into socialist revolutionaries, critics told The Post.
Philanthropist Liz Simons, daughter of late hedge-fund billionaire Jim Simons, oversees a foundation with a near-billion-dollar endowment trashing traditional race-neutral math in favor of race-obsessed leftist lessons inserting social justice principles into many aspects of students’ studies.
This approach, embraced in states like California but rejected in Florida, include thrusting racial and LGBTQ themes into previously straightforward lesson plans.
For instance, a lesson on how to use graphs to perform math could take a huge detour with teachers trying to drive home the point that there’s income disparity between white Americans and people of color.
Mamdani’s education platform includes halting charter school growth, expanding universal pre-K, and eliminating selective admissions standards for middle schools to help desegregate classrooms.
Although the topic of woke math has yet to surface on the campaign trail, critics fear Simons’ support signals Mamdani will embrace it.
Yiatin Chu, of Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum & Education and the Asian Wave Alliance, said she had “grave concerns” about the direction of public schools under Mamdani and that Simons’ influence is “troubling.”
“Woke math lowers the bar without helping black students. While test results show gains among black and Hispanic students, the gap with Asian and white students hasn’t closed. We hope Mamdani doesn’t undo progress.”
“This megadonor may impact his chancellor choice or NYC’s math curriculum,” she said.
Woke lessons teach students more about “how to be political activists” than actual math, insisted Jean Hahn, a public-school parent in Queens.
