Supposedly to make math less “racist,” California plans to make math less about math and more about “diversity” and left-wing ideology. Indeed, as California children get progressively dumber as measured on dumbed-down academic testing, the state just adopted a woke new “mathematics” framework being savaged by critics from across the political spectrum.
The new “math” scheme, designed to promote “social justice” and “equity,” radically de-emphasizes actual math. Numerous experts have already warned that minorities and lower-income students who cannot afford to supplement their government “education” will suffer the most. But the state is moving full speed ahead anyway.
“This framework provides strategies to challenge, engage, and support all students in deep and relevant math learning by building on successful approaches used in nations that produce high and equitable achievement in math,” claimed State Board of “Education” President Linda Darling-Hammond, a radical left-wing activist and known associate of communist terrorist Bill Ayers.
“It also draws on the experiences of educators who have worked for a decade to develop successful strategies for teaching California’s rigorous standards, carrying those lessons to others across the state,” continued Darling-Hammond, also a key figure behind weaponized “Social-Emotional Learning.” “This framework provides teachers and schools with a path to greater excellence with greater equity.”
Aside from her close ties to a man whose terror group bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and the State Department, Darling-Hammond is known for disastrous educational quackery. When given the chance to try out her ideas at Stanford New Schools, results showed the operation placed in the lowest-achieving 5 percent of schools in California — a state filled with schools where kids cannot even read and write.
The new program is openly aimed at promoting “social justice,” a term used by Marxists and totalitarians to sanitize the ideas that have resulted in hundreds of millions of government murders and countless other horrors. In fact, the framework itself declares that one of the key components of the instruction will be to “teach towards social justice.”
“Cultural and personal relevance is important for learning and also for creating mathematical communities that reflect California’s diversity,” the 1,000-page document explains. “Educators can learn to notice, utilize, and value students’ identities, assets, and cultural resources to support learning for all students.”
“Additionally, because culture and language can be intertwined, attending to cultural relevance may also enable teachers to attend to linguistic diversity – a key feature of California and relevant to the teaching and learning of mathematics,” the framework continues, using the term “cultural relevance” as a smokescreen for racialist indoctrination.
Already, California is a disaster when it comes to education, despite spending more than most other states per pupil. Less than one-third of students meet the state’s own dumbed-down math standards. (Millions cannot even read.) And yet under the new framework, most students will wait until high school for Algebra 1, meaning very few will get to calculus before graduation.
“Math concepts can be difficult to grasp, and there is nothing wrong with meeting kids where they are, but ‘woke math’ isn’t the answer,” fumed Senator Scott Wilk, a Republican on the Senate Education Committee. “If California wants to be a STEM leader it needs to keep high standards, and prove to minority students and students in underserved communities that they have the power within them to master those standards.”
The Newman Report first exposed the scheme in November of 2021. About 1,000 mathematicians, experts, and educators at the time — many from leading universities in the state — signed an open letter to top state officials pointing out that the proposed new standards would be the equivalent of pouring gasoline on the fire.
“For all the rhetoric in this framework about equity, social justice, environmental care and culturally appropriate pedagogy, there is no realistic hope for a more fair, just, equal and well-stewarded society if our schools uproot long-proven, reliable and highly effective math methods and instead try to build a mathless Brave New World on a foundation of unsound ideology,” warned the experts and educators.
Of course, this new math is from the same board of education that voted unanimously to force elementary-school children to chant to the demonic Aztec deities of cannibalism and human sacrifice under the guise of “ethnic studies.” It is also the same state where government schools have been repeatedly exposed trying to normalize not just gender-bending but pedophilia and child rape.
Ultimately, meddling with “math” standards and frameworks is the equivalent of polishing the brass handles on the Titanic. It is at best a total waste of time. Parents who love their children and want them to get an actual education have no choice but to withdraw from government schools. Thankfully, that is becoming an increasingly easy choice as millions flee public “education.”
