California Math Framework: Equity or Academic Sabotage?

“Through the vibrancy of our curriculum, the engagement of peers, and the guidance of thoughtful teachers, students leave with the tools to make a positive impact on the world.”

That’s how Branson School in Marin County describes its mission. It offers a traditional math sequence—Algebra I in 8th grade, calculus by senior year—and Governor Gavin Newsom is a believer; he sends his children there. The governor who champions “equity” for your children makes sure his own avoid it entirely.

California’s public school students aren’t so lucky. Under Newsom’s leadership, the state has embraced the 2023 California Mathematics Framework—built on the ideology that “equity” means lowering standards for everyone. The result is a curriculum that stalls most students at basic numeracy, shutting off access to STEM careers and other high-value fields.

The framework didn’t appear out of nowhere. It’s the product of two decades of education policy driven more by ideology than evidence. The Obama administration elevated the “college for all” mantra—arguing that equity meant getting every student into higher education, readiness be damned. The message to an entire generation was the same: don’t worry about preparation, just get on campus; more degrees will somehow create more wealth. It hasn’t. Instead of learning to “code,” as the President promised, many graduates now hold debt for degrees with little market value.  At the state level, Gates Foundation-funded reform networks and powerful teachers’ unions pushed to lower academic thresholds in the name of closing gaps. 

In California, that meant a wholesale rewrite of math education-abandoning centuries of proven tradition in favor of a victim-oppressor narrative that casts rigor as exclusion and mastery as privilege. Stanford professor Jo Boaler became the academic face of this shift—lending the legitimacy and credibility that Gates-funded reformers and union allies had long sought.  Her much-cited “Railside” study claimed that de-tracked, collaborative math instruction boosted performance for all students—but public data from the actual school showed no gains.

Nevertheless, Gates funding and union backing amplified Boaler’s influence, embedding her philosophy into state policy: traditional math’s speed and competition were recast as “masculine” and alienating, replaced with group work, real-world projects, and “mathematical agency” over procedural mastery. The framework discourages tracking, delays Algebra I until 9th grade, and swaps fluency for “real-world” applications and social-justice themes. The result: most students never reach Algebra II, shutting them out of STEM and other high-value fields before graduation. At San José State, for example, business majors must pass Business Calculus—three courses above basic algebra—just to graduate. Under the framework, many have no chance.

AB 705 from 2017 extends the damage into community college, where developmental math has been eliminated. Underprepared students are diverted into “statistics for non-majors” — essentially middle-school math — erasing their last chance to catch up and permanently locking them out of STEM, accounting, and other lucrative careers.  Colleges, facing waves of unprepared enrollees, steer them toward low-return majors like psychology, kinesiology, and interdisciplinary studies. For faculty unions, it’s stable enrollment; for students, it’s debt without skills—while rigorous pathways remain open only to those who were taught math.

Meanwhile, private schools like Branson maintain rigorous math tracks, sending graduates to elite universities and high-earning careers. For families who can write $60,000 tuition checks, opportunity is still on the table. For everyone else, the game is rigged. California once gave motivated students a pathway to compete through hard work and mastery. Those pathways are disappearing, and the loss isn’t just personal — it’s the state’s capacity to produce the skilled thinkers and leaders our future demands.

Mathematics is more than a subject—it’s a pillar of modern civilization. From Luca Pacioli’s double-entry bookkeeping to Alfred Marshall’s mathematically grounded economics, math has powered commerce, science, and culture. Weakening math readiness undermines entry into engineering, technology, and finance, eroding economic mobility.

At a moment when AI—built on an intellectual scaffolding of math—offers the greatest democratization of knowledge in human history, California is shrinking its citizens’ ability to use it. AI rewards disciplined thinking and structured reasoning—the very skills rigorous math develops.

California’s public schools don’t have to be laboratories for failed social-engineering experiments. Parents should demand the immediate repeal of the California Mathematics Framework and reject the ideology that equates rigor with exclusion. Policymakers must restore 8th-grade Algebra I, transparent tracking, and genuine acceleration options.

Money isn’t the problem—California spends over $20,000 per pupil each year, more than $130 billion in total. When those dollars fund ideology instead of instruction, there will never be enough for real learning.  This is a public system funded by the people, not a private playground for Gates-funded reformers and ideological experimenters. We cannot allow elites to redirect the mission of public education to serve their vision at the expense of our children.

Public education cannot become another Newsom-style bullet train or homeless boondoggle. This time, the stakes are far higher—California’s ability to produce the skilled minds its future depends on.