How to fix the woke teacher problem



It’s time to dismantle one of the most degraded sectors in American higher education: schools of education. The colleges responsible for training and certifying the majority of our nation’s teachers have become factories for mediocrity and indoctrination.

States have both the authority and obligation to replace these monolithic institutions by promoting better teacher-prep pathways that are already proving their worth across the nation.

As recent graduates of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, we believe that teachers must be more than competent technicians — they must deliberately form American citizens.

The declining value of schools of education is an opportunity for states to look elsewhere for teacher preparation.

Today, however, schools of education are the chief culprits in the growing disquiet among pundits and everyday Americans about the value of the traditional four-year college experience. Graduates with bachelor’s degrees in education are among the lowest earners of any college major. Even more alarmingly, recent research shows their degrees aren’t worth what they paid and are often financed with loans.

These schools are also failing to live up to their own promises. The National Council on Teacher Quality found in its most recent study that only one in eight teacher-prep programs dedicate “sufficient time” to covering fundamental math content; 28% of elementary programs “adequately address” all core components of reading instruction; and 3% require candidates to take courses in necessary science and social studies content.

Other research has further exposed education schools’ century-old dismissal of, and contempt for, rigorous academic content.

What are these institutions of higher learning teaching instead? American schools of education have long been infiltrated by the left’s “long march through the institutions” and serve as havens for neo-Marxist ideas.

At Stanford, we weren’t taught about the science of reading or what knowledge children should learn. Rather, we read Paulo Freire’s "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," a radical polemic that rejects the teaching of received knowledge as oppressive and envisions schools as drivers of political activism.

This intellectual lineage explains why critical theory and its offshoots such as the 1619 Project, which is riddled with historical inaccuracies yet was taught in 4,500 classrooms in a single year, have become so dominant in American public education.

At our alma mater, the influential education professor Jo Boaler has led efforts, backed by debunked research, to remove algebra from California middle schools while simultaneously building a consulting enterprise that charges schools thousands of dollars to implement these same “reforms.”

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All of this points to a simple conclusion: Education schools will not be reformed from within. A machine built on a flawed foundation cannot be repaired by replacing a few parts. We should not expect universities to solve the problem. They are the problem. The declining value of schools of education is an opportunity for states to look elsewhere for teacher preparation.

States can improve the quality of teacher preparation and boost teacher effectiveness by promoting alternative teacher training programs that are already proving their worth. Prospective teachers should first earn a bachelor’s degree in the subject they will teach — history, biology, math, or literature — then enter a focused, apprenticeship-style training under veteran classroom teachers.

Across the country, a growing ecosystem of alternative programs is allowing individuals without education degrees to enter the teaching profession. To be most effective, such programs should emphasize clinical practice, a proven predictor of teacher effectiveness that is often missing from university teacher preparation. This approach also enables new educators to earn their credentials while working and earning a good wage.

Clinical practice means educators are trained not in the ideological vacuum of schools of education, but inside real classrooms, learning from real teachers, and working with real students. In this way, teachers are grounded in the practical knowledge and skills that impact students’ academic outcomes, not ideology.

Studies show that in the first few years of teaching, demonstrated effectiveness is a far better predictor of long-term quality than the pathway through which a teacher was certified — and that greater differences exist among teachers who trained in the same program than those who bypassed such programs entirely.

Teach for America corps members, who are generally young, non-education majors, on average produce stronger gains for students than their traditional counterparts. At worst, they are no less effective than those who spent four years in a typical teacher prep program. Even earning a master’s degree in education does not reliably produce better educators.

Florida, for example, has developed a teacher certification program for professionals with non-education bachelor’s degrees and an apprenticeship program for those with associate’s degrees. These programs feature high-quality, self-paced curriculum modules for participants.

Tennessee offers the Job-Embedded Practitioner Licensure Program, enabling new educators to bypass the traditional credentialing bureaucracy entirely and earn their license while serving as teachers of record.

Arizona provides an Alternate Teaching certificate that similarly emphasizes real-world preparation, including a requirement that candidates demonstrate proficiency in both the U.S. Constitution and the Arizona Constitution, ensuring that even non-traditional entrants receive a grounding in civics free from ideological overlay.

Any replacement for the failed ed-school model must form educators capable of passing along the blessings of liberty to future generations. It’s time to recover the true purpose of public education: pursuing truth, cultivating virtue, and forming citizens who are morally capable of sustaining a free republic.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.

As DEI collapses, billionaires fund radical woke math



Jim Simons’ mathematical skills helped transform him from a prize-winning academic at Harvard and MIT into a legendary financier whose algorithmic models made Renaissance Technologies one of the most successful hedge funds in history. After his death last year, one of his consequential bequests went to his daughter, Liz, who oversees the Heising-Simons Foundation and its nearly billion-dollar endowment.

What Liz Simons has chosen to do with that inheritance might have surprised her father. Jim Simons devoted much of his charitable giving to basic research in mathematics and science, but his daughter’s foundation is moving in a very different direction. The Heising-Simons Foundation and similar organizations are supercharging a movement to remake K-12 mathematics education according to social justice principles.

Students are placed at a disadvantage when mathematical instruction is embedded in critical theory.

The revamp is profound. They reject well-established practices of math instruction while infusing lessons with racial and gender themes. The goal is to motivate disadvantaged students while dispensing with the traditional features of math — like numerical computation, which they struggle with on standardized tests — considered an oppressive feature of white supremacist culture.

Philanthropy-funded ‘anti-racist’ math

In many quarters, including corporations and universities, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are in retreat due to pressure from the Trump administration and the courts. Not so in public education, with curricula that are locally controlled and largely insulated from the dictates of Washington.

That allows progressive foundations and like-minded charitable trusts to continue to pour millions of dollars into reshaping math education for black and Latino kids — including an $800,000 grant this year from the Heising-Simons Foundation — even though no credible research exists showing that the social justice approach improves their performance.

“Politicians and legislatures, even school boards,” are often too “hamstrung” to get things done, Bob Hughes, the director of K-12 education at the Gates Foundation, said at an online symposium on the need for racial equity policies in America's classrooms. Philanthropy, he added, faces fewer barriers in making rapid changes.

The Gates Foundation has been a leader in the promotion of anti-racist math instruction. It supported a project called “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction.” The project discards basic tenets of learning, like asking students to “show their work” and find the “right” answer as vestiges of “white supremacy culture.” The pathway is promoted by EdTrust West, which also receives support from the Spencer Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, and other major donors.

The Gates and Heising-Simons foundations have both supported TODOS Mathematics for All, an Arizona-based organization that calls for elevating diversity, equity, and inclusion practices and anti-racist activism into all math instruction, with over $553,750 in grants in recent years. “We can no longer believe that a focus on curriculum, instruction, and assessment alone will be enough to prepare our children for survival in the world. We need anti-racist conversations for ourselves and for our children,” TODOS President Linda Fulmore announced in 2020.

Last year, the group hosted an hour-long webinar on “2SLGBTQIA+ identity in mathematics education.” During the event, a speaker expounded at length on various queer and indigenous identity groups while spending virtually no time on math-related curriculum or instruction.

At one point, the presenter erroneously claimed that there are “15.3 billion students in U.S. high schools” — a figure that would require the entire global population to be enrolled in American secondary education twice over. The speaker likely meant to say million.

‘Race-centered’ math

The foundations similarly fund practical lessons that put race at the center of math instruction. In Alexandria, Virginia, for example, the Heising-Simons Foundation supported a public-school program that encouraged kindergartners through second-graders to count the characters in picture books by race. At the end of each session, teachers guided students in creating racial scorecards for each book, then voting to select those with the fewest white characters. The exercise was presented as mathematics education.

Jo Boaler, a controversial professor of education at Stanford University who championed the push to remove eighth-grade algebra from San Francisco’s public schools in the name of equity, traces her support to this network of foundations. The Gates Foundation and Valhalla Foundation, which was founded by Scott Cook, the co-founder of tech firm Intuit, have long funded her math education project called YouCubed.

These deep-pocket donors also fund Danny Bernard Martin, a professor of math education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a leading voice of what critics call “woke math.”

Over the past six years, the Racial Justice in Early Mathematics Project, which Martin co-leads at the Erikson Institute in Chicago, has received nearly $2.5 million from the Heising-Simons Foundation. This year, the foundation announced an additional $800,000 grant to help the project develop tool kits for wider implementation among teachers, administrators, and researchers.

Martin’s views extend far beyond typical calls for educational equity. He regards mathematics instruction as fundamentally a “white supremacist construct” that inflicts “epistemological violence” on black students. In his estimation, even DEI programs are too conservative — mere accommodations “rooted in the fictions of white imaginaries” and designed to appease “white logics and sensibilities.”

The solution Martin proposes is radical: Black students should seek instruction exclusively from black teachers at “independent black institutions.” They should resist the temptation of “advanced coursework and mathematics-related employment” and instead engage in “walkouts and boycotts” to protest against mathematics education as it currently exists.

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The very structure of math instruction, Martin contends, has dehumanized black students through low test scores and failing grades.

The ideas of the Racial Justice in Early Mathematics Project and its leaders have reverberated through America’s classrooms. California’s new mathematics curriculum framework, which guides K-12 education statewide, repeatedly cites Martin.

Educators have sharply criticized the framework for leaning heavily on politicized concepts of math. The document suggests, for instance, that teachers “take a justice-oriented perspective” when providing instruction and discourages the use of “tracking” — or the practice of separating students into different classrooms based on their abilities.

Educators push back

Williamson Evers, a former assistant secretary of education and a fellow at the conservative-leaning Independent Institute, has been monitoring what he calls the “woke math” movement for years. “It’s very important to have math skills,” he told RealClearInvestigations.

Evers rejects the identity-based claims made by Martin and others who have called for minority students to abandon math education over alleged racism. “There are mathematicians and scientists on every continent from every background, and this idea of boycotting education would harm black schoolchildren.”

Elizabeth Statmore, a math teacher at the elite Lowell High School in San Francisco and a critic of social justice math, says the way to improve the performance of black and Latino students lies in the nitty-gritty, such as better teaching, holding students accountable, and providing them with more academic and emotional support.

Critics say the emphasis on prose over calculation will exacerbate the very disparities that social justice advocates claim to address.

“But it’s not sexy; they’re not on the keynote circuit like Danny Bernard Martin and Jo Boaler,” Statmore said. “They’re building a brand, not doing the kind of math education research that is helping to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children.”

Representatives of the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Erikson Institute, and Martin did not respond to requests for comment.

The Heising-Simons Foundation’s focus on racializing math education reflects its broader ideological commitments. Like many progressive foundations, it uses its significant funds to advance a range of left-wing policies that might have a hard time establishing themselves without billionaire support.

The foundation has also donated to PolicyLink, the organization behind DefundPolice.org, and to the Anti-Police Terror Project, which advocates for abolishing police departments in high-crime cities like Oakland, California. Liz Simons was also among a small clique of California megadonors behind the push to elect progressive prosecutors such as George Gascón in Los Angeles and Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. They declined to pursue felony charges against a range of violent offenders over concerns about racial equity.

The attempt to reimagine mathematics through the lens of critical race theory isn’t new — scholars have been working along these lines since the 1980s. They argue that historical racial oppression continues to influence everything from geometry curricula to standardized testing. Traditional emphases on objectivity, rigorous standards, and subject-matter mastery should be replaced, the scholars argue, with ideological exercises designed to promote racial and social consciousness.

What is new is the scale and speed of adoption. As America has grappled with questions of racial justice in recent years, billionaire foundations have provided the resources to implement these ideas widely in both public and private schools.

The donors appear motivated by a deep sense of ideological commitment to righting past wrongs related to racial injustice.

At the 2020 education donor symposium, Liz Simons recalled her experience working briefly as a Spanish bilingual teacher in an impoverished community in Oakland. “The much larger systemic problems,” she witnessed, Simons said, guided her to the goal of shaping early childhood education.

Na’ilah Suad Nasir, president of the Spencer Foundation, noted that she previously worked as the vice chancellor of “equity and inclusion” at the University of California, Berkeley. Expanding racial equity in education, she said, has been her “life’s work.”

Widening disparities

When it comes to math instruction, social justice means stripping it of basic features like numbers. In workshops hosted by the Racial Justice in Early Mathematics Project in 2023, the group promoted “numberless word problems” — mathematical exercises stripped of numerical computation. The method, instructors explain, is designed to counter “European ways of knowing and doing.”

Sisa Pon Renie, one presenter, spoke of wanting to challenge the “persistent myth that math is just abstract and without any cultural relevance.” The project champions this numberless approach as essential for “helping children understand how mathematics might be an important tool to understand social issues and promote justice.”

But critics say the emphasis on prose over calculation will exacerbate the very disparities that social justice advocates claim to address.

“Imagine you’re a Cambodian refugee, and you get some math problem that’s loaded with prose,” Evers, of the Independent Institute, said. “Maybe you’re very good at the figures part, the calculating part, the mathematical part.”

Such students, he argued, are placed at a disadvantage when mathematical instruction is embedded in critical-theory frameworks and dense with English text. “They unnecessarily load these things down, make it harder, and it’s not even math. It’s an inadequate mode of teaching.”

The real-world consequences of these approaches have played out most dramatically in San Francisco. A decade ago, officials removed Algebra 1 from middle schools, arguing that the change would give black and Latino students, who were underrepresented in the math class, more time to prepare while avoiding placing them in lower-level tracks.

David Margulies, a parent involved with the San Francisco community, observed that families wanting their children to take Algebra 1 in eighth grade shifted away from public to private schools, online learning, and homeschooling. Students who don’t take the math class in middle school find it more difficult to take calculus in high school.

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Photo by via Getty Images

“Families figured out how important this is, and they are looking elsewhere,” he noted.

A 2023 Stanford study found that San Francisco’s Algebra 1 experiment did little to close racial achievement gaps. Black enrollment in Advanced Placement math classes remained unchanged, while Latino participation increased by 1%.

Meanwhile, education systems that have increased rather than decreased academic rigor have seen notable improvements in black student performance. In 2019, Dallas public schools began automatically enrolling students who performed well on state exams in middle-school algebra. The program increased black participation in advanced mathematics from 17% in 2018 to 43% in 2023.

Walking it back

Last year, during a Racial Justice in Early Mathematics Project webinar titled “Who Is Labeled Smart?” Martin addressed the backlash against San Francisco’s push for educational equity. He toned down his scathing critique of merit-based advanced education programs that he believes harm black and Latino students and made a surprising statement about his own son’s schooling.

“I’m guilty, I’m guilty,” Martin said, almost sheepishly. “My son is, quote unquote, in one of those tracks.”

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.

Woke Stanford academic branded as 'Professor Karen' for threatening to call cops on Berkeley professor who exposed her being paid $40,000 for 8 hours of consulting work



A woke Stanford University professor is being labeled as "Professor Karen" after threatening to call the cops on a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The battle between the academics escalated when it was revealed that the Stanford professor was being paid handsomely for consultations about teaching math.

Jo Boaler – an education professor at Stanford – clashed with Jelani Nelson – a computer science professor at UC Berkeley. The altercation began on March 31 when Nelson wrote on Twitter, "The proposed CA Math Framework states improving math learning for black students as central motivation and has 0 black authors."

Boaler is one of five authors of the latest draft of the California Mathematics Framework – "curriculum framework that provides guidance to educators, parents, and publishers, to support implementing California content standards."

Part of the math framework is incorporating social justice into learning mathematics.

“I can tell you that the social justice angle is one that has been blown up," Boaler said in November, 2021. "It's not a huge part of what we're recommending, but what we're saying is, 'Of course, mathematics can be used to highlight issues in the world.'”

KXTV reported, "The wage gap, for example, could be a math problem: Women earn only 82% of men’s wages for the same work."

In his tweet, Nelson also pointed out that Boaler makes a fortune from teaching sessions.

"Instead, one author has alarmingly lucrative consulting deals with school districts with large minority populations, charging $5,000/hr," Nelson wrote.

"I've spent 1000+ hours setting up/contributing to educational programs for the benefit of black kids for free," he added. "Total I've made: $0 (actually negative, since I sometimes spent my own money). Representation matters."

Nelson referenced how Boaler was reportedly paid $40,000 from the Oxnard School District in 2021 for "four two-hour sessions at the rate of $5,000 per hour for a total of $40,000."

Boaler told the San Francisco Gate that Nelson was spreading "misinformation."

"He was spreading misinformation – that is not my hourly rate, or anything close to the rate paid by Oxnard and as a fellow academic he knows this to be the case," Boaler told the outlet. "If we conservatively assume 11 hours per hour, then the rate of pay would be $454.00 per hour, If you ask academics you will find that is a very reasonable rate – actually on the low end."

I've spent 1000+ hours setting up/contributing to educational programs for the benefit of black kids for free (http://addiscoder.com\u00a0, http://jamcoders.org.jm\u00a0, DHBSRI). Total I've made: $0 (actually negative, since I sometimes spent my own money). Representation matters.
— Jelani Nelson (@Jelani Nelson) 1648770669

Boaler emailed Nelson on April 1. On Twitter, Nelson posted a screenshot of the email with the alleged threat to call the police.

“As a courtesy to a fellow faculty member I wanted to let you know that the sharing of private details about me on social media yesterday is now being taken up by police and lawyers," Boaler reportedly wrote.

"I was shocked to see that you are taking part in spreading misinformation and harassing me online," Boaler added, despite Nelson not tagging her or writing her name in the original tweet.

Nelson compared Boaler's threat to other infamous white women who have called the police on black men in the past.

Nelson tweeted, "A @Stanford professor just threatened me with police. After BBQ Becky, Permit Patty, Golfcart Gail, and all the memes, we now have Retweet Rachel."

"Public advisory: don’t call the cops on black people for no reason," he continued. "Black people disagreeing with you on Twitter is not a crime."

A @Stanford professor just threatened me with police. After BBQ Becky, Permit Patty, Golfcart Gail, and all the memes, we now have Retweet Rachel. Public advisory: don't call the cops on black people for no reason. Black people disagreeing with you on Twitter is not a crime.pic.twitter.com/es92C765NQ
— Jelani Nelson (@Jelani Nelson) 1649170926

Boaler told the San Francisco Gate, "I would never even think of threatening a black man with the police, I know how serious that is in our society and there could be nothing further from my intent."

"It goes against all of my life work which has been to support and elevate the needs of marginalized students," she said. "I have publicly stated that I am sorry for the way it read — that I did not intend it to be threatening."

Boaler claims that the "misinformation" has caused her to receive "threatening, hateful and misogynistic emails and texts."

"The naming of me as 'retweet Rachel' has been picked up by right wing news media, and is horrible," she stated.

Boaler said that she had apologized to Nelson, but he has yet to respond.

"What must not get lost in this troubling incident is the much larger issue of K-12 math education in this state: the California Math Framework (CMF) proposal is a misguided revision of state guidelines on math education that will negatively affect tens of millions of Californians, including my own two children," Nelson said. "This pathway leaves students unprepared for quantitative four-year college degrees via a newly proposed pathway for teaching mathematics that lacks essential content."

Police were involved in another situation involving Boaler and a fellow professor in 2003.

Wayne Bishop – a professor of mathematics at California State University – reportedly made a hyperbolic statement that allegedly made Boaler feel unsafe.

In 2012, Boaler said of the incident, "In 2003. Bishop discussed Schools of Education in the US and suggested to readers that they 'nuke ‘em all dammit.' This, alongside his personal attacks on my work, prompted Stanford’s police department to travel to LA to speak to Wayne Bishop."

Bishop reportedly confirmed having the police called on him for his remark, but noted that he received one phone call and no authorities visited him.