Billionaire Zohran Mamdani donor has bankrolled 'woke math' movement

Elizabeth Simons, the billionaire heiress who gave $250,000 to a super PAC supporting Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign, is also helping fund a national effort to push “woke math” in public schools.

Simons is the daughter of the late hedge fund billionaire Jim Simons and helps oversee a foundation with an endowment of nearly $1 billion that promotes left-wing education initiatives focused on race and social justice.  

The Heising-Simons Foundation, which she co-founded with her husband Mark Heising, has donated millions to projects promoting “woke math,” or math lessons that weave social justice topics, race, and gender into the discussions.

That includes $1.7 million since 2023 to the Racial Justice in Early Mathematics Project at Chicago’s Erikson Institute. In March, the foundation gave $800,000 for seminars, toolkits, and teacher support materials, and in 2021, it provided $900,000 to fund grants encouraging the addition of “racial justice” themes to math lessons.

This type of curriculum has been embraced in states such as California but rejected in red states like Florida. It often incorporates racial and LGBTQ themes into traditional math lessons, such as using graphs to illustrate income disparities between racial groups.

While Mamdani has not yet addressed the topic of “woke math” directly on the campaign trail, there is a belief that Simons’ support could mean Mamdani will embrace it, according to a report by the New York Post.

Yiatin Chu, of Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum & Education and the Asian Wave Alliance, told the outlet she had “grave concerns” about what schools would look like under Mamdani’s leadership as well as Simons’ influence on his campaign.

“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,” Chu said. “This megadonor may impact his chancellor choice or NYC’s math curriculum,”

Jean Hahn, a public school parent in Queens, echoed those concerns. She argued that the lessons focus more on activism than education, teaching black students “how to be political activists.”

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