by WorldTribune Staff, September 9, 2025 Real World News
The socialist who believes billionaires shouldn't exist has taken a hefty donation from a billionaire heiress who is heavily into "woke math."
If their calculations are correct, socialist Zohran Mamdani will be the next New York mayor with an assist from hedge fund heiress Liz Simons.
Simons, who is bankrolling a national push to transform children into socialist revolutionaries by bringing “woke math” into public schools, has gifted $250,000 to a PAC supporting Mamdani, the New York Post reported on Sept. 6.
In June, Mamdani told NBC: “I don’t think that we should have billionaires, frankly.”
Simons, who oversees a foundation with a near-billion-dollar endowment, seeks to replace traditional math in public schools with race and LGBTQ-obsessed leftist social justice lessons.
"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," Rich Carter wrote for The Post.
Though Mamdani has not mentioned woke math on the campaign trail, critics fear Simons’s support signals the Democrat mayoral candidate will embrace it.
Yiatin Chu, of Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum & Education and the Asian Wave Alliance, told The Post she has “grave concerns” about the direction of public schools under Mamdani and that Simons’s 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,” Chu said. “This megadonor may impact his chancellor choice or NYC’s math curriculum.”
Woke lessons teach students more about “how to be political activists” than actual math, said 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, Jim Simons, a top mathematician turned hedge-fund legend died in May 2024 with a net worth over $31 billion.
"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," Carter noted.
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, Virginia, 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.
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.
An August RealClearInvestigations report found “no credible research” proving the woke math approach improves performance.
