Billionaire Zohran Mamdani Donor Bankrolling National ‘Woke Math’ Movement

The wealthy heiress who recently handed over $250,000 to a super PAC boosting socialist Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign is also behind a nationwide drive to push “woke math” into classrooms — a movement critics warn is designed to mold students into socialist radicals, The NY Post was told.

Liz Simons, the daughter of late hedge fund billionaire Jim Simons, runs a foundation worth nearly a billion dollars that denounces traditional, race-neutral math and replaces it with race-centered, progressive instruction that infuses social justice into standard lessons.

This model, which has been promoted in California but blocked in Florida, alters basic subjects by injecting racial discussions into otherwise straightforward math exercises.

For example, a class on interpreting graphs could morph into a broader conversation about economic inequality between white Americans and minority groups.

Mamdani’s education agenda includes stopping the expansion of charter schools, broadening access to universal pre-K, and removing competitive admissions criteria for middle schools in order to integrate classrooms more fully.

While “woke math” hasn’t yet been a centerpiece of the mayoral contest, critics worry Simons’ backing of Mamdani points to him supporting such ideas.

Yiatin Chu, who leads Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum & Education as well as the Asian Wave Alliance, said she was alarmed at the possibility and found Simons’ influence “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 added.

Jean Hahn, a Queens public-school mother, argued that woke math lessons focus more on political training than academic skills.

“I’m already concerned as a parent that Mamdani has stated he will resume” many of former far-left Mayor Bill de Blasio’s “diversity initiatives, which were racially toxic,” Hahn said.

Simons inherited an immense fortune after her father — a mathematician turned hedge fund titan — died in May 2024 with a net worth exceeding $31 billion, and she has been spending his fortune aggressively.

She and her husband, philanthropist Mark Heising, co-founded the Heising-Simons Foundation, which has invested heavily in woke math programs. That includes $1.7 million since 2023 for the Racial Justice in Early Mathematics Project (RJEM) at Chicago’s Erikson Institute.

In Chicago, where fewer than 20 percent of public school students are proficient in math, the foundation funneled $800,000 this March into RJEM to develop seminars, teaching guides, and resources for educators incorporating “racial justice” into math lessons. Two years earlier, it distributed $900,000 for $7,000 teacher mini-grants promoting the same cause.

Between 2022 and 2023, Heising-Simons also poured at least $4 million into other woke math organizations, tax filings show. That included $630,825 to San Francisco’s Tandem Partners in Early Learning and $665,000 to Arizona-based Illustrative Mathematics.

The foundation further funded a math program in Alexandria, Virginia, that instructed young children to count storybook characters by skin color and create racial breakdown charts — even noting books with very few white characters.

The impact of this effort remains unclear.

Still, Virginia placed dead last in the nation — 51st out of all 50 states and Washington, D.C. — for math recovery between 2019 and 2024, while Alexandria students fell more than a grade level behind in reading compared to pre-pandemic, according to federal testing released in January.

Simons’ foundation also joined with the Gates Foundation to give $553,750 to TODOS Mathematics for All, an Arizona-based nonprofit pushing DEI and “anti-racist activism” in math teaching, according to RealClearInvestigations.

That same investigation reported “no credible research” proving that woke math raises achievement.

Despite Mamdani’s prior claim that billionaires “shouldn’t exist,” Simons stunned political observers when she dropped $250,000 last month into New Yorkers for Lower Costs, a PAC created to back his mayoral run.

{Matzav.com}