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. America, along with most of the Western world, acknowledged its age-old sin of denying equal rights to women. Then, with the civil-rights movement, came the confession that the denial of rights to black citizens was a grievous injustice. As Americans who lived under segregation, including my father, Shelby Steele, have observed, these confessions opened the door to enormous reservoirs of power by triggering white guilt. Many individuals, including my grandfather, who lived 67 of his 76 years under segregation, chose to embrace their newfound freedoms and live as full Americans while refusing to exploit white guilt. But there were many who did exploit it. And since America was one of the few countries where the formerly oppressed lived next door to their former oppressors, many whites in their guilt were reluctant to see blacks as fully accountable morally and politically (an ironic failure to grant them equal treatment).

For some whites afflicted by guilt, a fixation on race, gender, and other immutable characteristics became their means to redemption and power: They would engineer the optics of diversity, equity, and inclusion to recapture innocence and reclaim the moral authority lost after those great confessions of America’s sins.

For Emmy Noether, there was no collective guilt to exploit. She had to rely on sheer intelligence, ingenuity, and stoicism to overcome the obstacles to pursuing her life’s work. By contrast, Boaler pursued a path to success and power by embracing the notion that immutable characteristics are more important than individual merit. Is that much different from the views of American segregationists who exploited race as a means to power?

Since the 1960s, we’ve witnessed countless figures, especially in academia, and one institution after another, from colleges to corporations, betray the principles of merit, individuality, and responsibility. They have instead adopted a self-righteous satisfaction, but at the cost of reducing minority individuals to their skin and social backgrounds, reinforcing identities of perpetual victimization and cultivating a culture of dependency in permanent underclasses in cities across America.

The Left’s lack of faith in those they claimed to be helping had rather predictable consequences: the lack of progress since the 1960s in closing the educational-achievement gap between whites and blacks. As Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution argued in 2016, “if we continue to close gaps at the same rate in the future, it will be roughly two and a half centuries before the black–white math gap closes and over one and a half centuries until the reading gap closes.” Among the failed efforts to close the gap were universities’ ramping up of race-based affirmative action, the Ebonics debacle of the late 1990s, and the elimination of phonics from the classroom despite its track record as a tool for achieving literacy.

What made the failures especially pernicious was the refusal of those pushing leftist ideology to admit them. Instead the Left marched leftward, and today it has reached the extreme of valuing color over character and victim status over merit. Anyone who questions these ideas is denounced as a white supremacist, a misogynist, or the latest kind of -phobe.

Jo Boaler, born in Britain but having forged her academic career in the United States, had her identity shaped as a white liberal woman within this shallow moral order of an obsession with racial equity. As a white, she carries the sins of America’s racist past. As a woman, she is a victim of America’s sexist past. And as a liberal, she is the ideological paragon of “the good” that will lead America from evil to virtue. She could therefore fashion herself as a patron saint of renouncing white privilege and standing up to the white male patriarchy. Today, she claims that the “six men” — she is consistent in her belief that the sex of her critics is highly significant — who questioned the validity of her work “are part of a broader, organized campaign to discredit me.” While it was merit that lofted Noether into the realm of success and allowed her to defy the discrimination she faced, Boaler views merit as an obstacle. And California has bought into her worldview. The website of Youcubed, Boaler’s nonprofit hosted by the Stanford Graduate School of Education, claims to have had an impact on 400 million students. Among Youcubed’s recommendations is to reject Algebra 2 classes in favor of data-science classes that contain little rigorous math. Boaler also led the initiative for the Mathematics Framework for California Public Schools, which the state board of education adopted in 2023. This framework will leave the state’s brightest students unprepared to attain four-year college degrees in math and related disciplines.

Along the way, Boaler has charged exorbitant consulting fees, including billing a poor minority school district $5,000 an hour, for a total of $65,000. She sends her own children to a $48,000-a-year private school. When the integrity of her work was questioned, she lashed out, accusing her critics, several of them Stanford University math professors, of sexism against her and racism against minority kids.

Boaler has been insulated from criticism because she operates as a loyal soldier of the corrupt ideology of DEI. Meanwhile, the minority underclass remains exploited. In California, 65 percent of all students do not meet grade-level proficiency in math. As long as we allow ideologues like Boaler to influence the education of our children, we will not be giving them the knowledge and skills that are the entire purpose of sending them to school — and that are necessary to create the next Emmy Noether.