Let me tell you about a new front in the culture war: “woke math.” This isn’t math disguised as politics — it’s politics disguised as math. And the goal? To shift from teaching facts to spreading ideology. Recently, the Heising-Simons Foundation — backed by billionaire heiress Liz Simons — has poured serious money into radical math curricula. Their agenda: replace “traditional, race-neutral math” with lessons laced with social justice, racial themes, and gender ideology.
Make no mistake: this isn’t about improving test scores or closing racial gaps. It’s about redefining what education is for. These “equity-based” math programs argue that numerical operations and computation are “white supremacist constructs” — that even basic arithmetic must be deconstructed and reimagined through identity lenses. We already see this in agendas pushed by organizations like “TODOS: Mathematics for All,” which calls for embedding anti-racist, LGBT identity messaging into math instruction — not just once in a side note, but as an integral part of the curriculum. In webinars, speakers spend far more time talking queer identity than actual math problems.
The motivation of these mega donors and foundations like Bill Gates and Liz Simons is quite clear: to undermine objective truth and replace it with woke identity narratives. Subject matter becomes secondary to the story you tell about race, gender, and power dynamics. The more radical the lens — the more influence the ideology exerts. Test scores don’t back up this advance of “woke math” – and worse yet, these programs are causing a sharp decline in the numbers for the very minority groups they claim to support.
What’s behind all this? Socialist mega donors like Liz Simons don’t play in just the big federal races. They are actively backing the rise of socialist figures at the local level. Zohran Mamdani and similarly radical figures across city government and school boards show that the left wing’s big donors still see public education as one of their best tools for remaking society.
We must reject this. Math is a neutral tool, not an ideological battlefield. Schools should aim to teach truths that transcend politics, not funnel students into progressive indoctrination. Parents, educators, and policymakers must fight back — demand clear standards, transparent curricula, and accountability to empirical results, not social justice agendas.
It’s no secret that globalists are bent on destroying Western culture. Whether the threat comes from inside or outside our borders, America must be protected from cultural Marxist. Get into the grassroots fight at PhyllisSchlafly.com, that’s PhyllisSchlafly.com. And join us again for the Phyllis Schlafly Report.
This post originally appeared at https://phyllisschlafly.com/family/education/woke-math-movement-gains-steam-from-socialists/