A Stanford Professor’s Dangerous Fuzzy-Math Crusade

An assault on basic and proven education standards is being carried out in the name of racial and gender equity

Hi all,

I hope you’re doing well. All good on our end. We’ve been busy editing the “White Guilt” documentary these days and it’s on solid footing.

I wanted to share an essay that I wrote for National Review on Stanford University’s Jo Boaler. For those of you who don’t know, she’s has led the general effort to dumb down math education in CA and elsewhere

. The article is behind a paywall but you get three free articles. So if you like the opening, click on the link to read the rest.

Last March, an anonymous 100-page complaint was filed against Stanford University’s Jo Boaler, a lead architect of the controversial California Math Framework, alleging that she “engaged in reckless disregard for accuracy through citation misrepresentation.” The well-documented complaint, listing 52 such instances and backed by several California mathematicians and scientists, struck a nerve. Boaler’s “research” and conclusions had been used to dismiss the idea that some students are gifted and to support the removal of Algebra 1 from the state’s eighth-grade curriculum. She also argued that timed math tests induced anxiety and that students perform better when teachers refrain from grading their work. This assault on some of the most basic and proven education standards was carried out in the name of racial and gender equity, and Boaler often smeared her critics with charges of racism and sexism.

Several days after it was filed, Stanford announced a review, described as “not a formal probe,” of this complaint. In April, the university announced that it had concluded the review and that there would be no formal investigation since the allegations “reflect scholarly disagreement and interpretation.” In other words, Stanford dismissed the objective nature of the complaint and its cited sources by declaring it subjective and up for debate.

As I mulled over Stanford’s response, a name I had not thought of for some time came to mind: Emmy Noether.

Born in Germany in 1882, Noether was permitted only to audit mathematics courses at the university where her father taught; women were not allowed to formally enroll. She was such a stellar student that the university awarded her the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree, and she went on to obtain a doctorate. She taught for years but without pay or formal title, again because of her sex, specializing in abstract algebra and the mathematics of symmetry. Her breakthrough came in 1918 when she proved what would become known as Noether’s theorem, its insight being that every observed symmetry is connected with a mathematical law of conservation. Its importance was widely recognized by mathematicians and physicists, including Albert Einstein. Noether faced even greater obstacles as a Jew in 1930s Germany; ousted from her university teaching position by the Nazis, she left for America.

Today, as they pursue redress for America’s past sins against blacks and women, progressives like Boaler have damned the mathematics — of numbers, space, structure, change, deductions, logic, and reasoning — that Noether studied and excelled at despite discrimination, as the domain of the white patriarchal male. 

Boaler first made her name with an argument against tracking, which is the grouping of students by skill level. She thought that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), not merit, should be guiding principles in an effort to lessen racial and gender disparities in educational achievement. Today, a few miles up the road from Stanford, the Sequoia Union High School District is embroiled in a bitter conflict with outraged parents who recently learned that, for the past eight years, it had been stealthily removing honors classes — math as well as English, chemistry, physics, etc. — from the curriculum because minority students were underrepresented in them. “Our district mission is to engage and prepare all students to excel in a global society,” said Erin Walsh, an English teacher at one of the district’s high schools. “A detracked heterogeneous class does exactly that by exposing students to a more diverse classroom community.”

Yet two of the middle schools that feed into the high-school district’s one-size-fits-all math classes showed an eight-year gap in grade-level proficiency between those schools’ student populations, according to education researchers at Stanford and Harvard. In 2023, students at Cesar Chavez Ravenswood Middle School, in working-class East Palo Alto, were four years behind the U.S. average, while students at La Entrada Middle School, in wealthy Menlo Park, were four years ahead. The former school, where only 5 percent of students are proficient in math for their grade level, receives $4,000 more funding per pupil per year than the latter school, and its nonprofit education foundation had $12 million in total revenue in 2022.

In the San Francisco Unified School District, in 2014, Boaler’s influence contributed to the removal of Algebra 1 from eighth grade in the name of equity. Richard Carranza, the superintendent at the time, who later became the chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, praised Boaler as a “rock star in the math world” for her research that “indicates math is not about memorization or learning lots of rules.” The removal of Algebra 1 deprived many students of the chance to reach calculus come senior year if their families could not afford private classes or tutoring.

Moreover, the performance of minority students declined after 2014. In 2015, only 12 percent of the black students in San Francisco public schools met or exceeded grade-level proficiency in math. By 2023, that number dropped to 11 percent. Boaler may have focused on racial equity, but was improving the math skills of minority students ever her goal?

Boaler’s project elevated the racial and equity agenda over American values of uplift. How did she attain the moral imperative to pursue it, and what gave her impunity even as the great decline in American K–12 education proceeded? After all, it wasn’t with the approval of the public: In March of this year, 82 percent of San Francisco voters approved a proposal to restore Algebra 1 to eighth grade.

The answer has its roots in the first six decades of the 20th century…

For the rest of the essay, click here.

Would love to know what you think. All my best and thank you for reading,

Eli