Billionaire Zohran Mamdani donor bankrolling national ‘woke math’ movement

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 black students more about “how to be political activists” than actual math, insisted Jean Hahn, a public-school parent in Queens.

“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,” said Hahn.

Simons inherited a fortune after her father — a top mathematician turned hedge-fund legend — died in May 2024 with a net worth over $31 billion, and she’s not been shy about spending his money.

The Heising-Simons Foundation, co-founded by Simons and her philanthropist husband Mark Heising, has given millions to the woke math cause — including $1.7 million since 2023 to the Racial Justice in Early Mathematics Project at Chicago’s Erikson Institute.

In Chicago, less than one in five public school students can do basic math, based on recent test scores.

In March, the foundation gave RJEM $800,000 to organize seminars, toolkits, and support for teachers adding “racial justice” to math classes. Two years earlier, it gave $900,000 for $7,000 teacher grants to promote “racial justice” through early math.

From 2022 through 2023, Heising-Simons also gave at least $4 million to other groups backing woke math, including $630,825 to San Francisco-based Tandem Partners in Early Learning and $665,000 to Arizona’s Illustrative Mathematics, according to its latest available tax filings.

It also funded a “mathematics education” program in Alexandria, Va., encouraging K–2 students at one school to count picture book characters by race and create a racial scorecard — including tracking books with few white characters.

It was not immediately clear Friday how these students have fared since participating in the program.

However, Virginia schools ranked last in the U.S. — 51st among the 50 states and D.C. — in math recovery between 2019 and 2024 with Alexandria public schools students reading more than a grade level behind where they were pre-pandemic, according to the Nation’s Report Card released in January.

Simons’ foundation and the Gates Foundation have jointly given $553,750 to TODOS Mathematics for All, an Arizona group promoting DEI practices and “anti-racist activism” in math instruction, according to a report by RealClearInvestigations.

The report also found “no credible research” proving the woke math approach improves performance.

Simons made the jaw-dropping $250,000 donation last month to New Yorkers for Lower Costs, a political action committee promoting Mamdani’s campaign, despite the mayoral-race frontrunner infamously claiming earlier on the campaign trail that billionaire’s shouldn’t exist.

Reps for Mamdani and Simons did not immediately return messages.