• Jo Boaler, a Stanford professor of math education, is arguably the person most responsible for the new California Math Framework, a set of curriculum recommendations that advocate against teaching most middle-schoolers algebra in the name of equity.

• Though she advocates for these changes in the public school system, she's sent her own children to a $48,000-a-year private school that teaches its middle schoolers algebra, and charged an underfunded school district $5,000 an hour for her consulting services.

• An anonymous 100-page complaint recently documented over 30 claims of alleged citation misrepresentation in her research — the very research that underpins the CMF.

Jo Boaler, a Stanford professor of mathematics education, is arguably the person most responsible for the new California Math Framework (CMF), a newly approved set of curricular guidance for teachers across the state’s more than 950 public school districts. These guidelines, which are non-binding but help shape instructional materials and practice, suggest delaying instruction of Algebra I until high school and teaching fuzzy “data science” courses as alternatives to calculus in the name of ensuring “equity.” The CMF has long been accused of distorting research to fit its policy agenda, but last week it got hit with what might be its most damning blow yet: a 100-page, well-sourced document published by an anonymous complainant alleging that many of the misrepresented citations throughout the CMF can be traced directly back to Boaler.

Though some of the specific allegations are new, the complainant’s conclusion — that Boaler has “engaged in reckless disregard for accuracy” throughout her career — won't be surprising to those familiar with her track record. Besides routinely misrepresenting citations for decades, Boaler also has a history of deceptively presenting her professional credentials, charging underperforming schools exorbitant consulting fees, and pushing to water-down public school courses while placing her own children in elite private schools.

Boaler first made a name for herself in the mid-2000s by advocating against “tracking” — a system designed to allow high-performing students to be appropriately challenged and underperforming students to receive appropriate support — and instead promoting “heterogeneous classes,” where students’ demonstrated math ability is ignored and all are taught the same content. For years, she’s had the ear of administrators and policy wonks eager to reform teaching practices in a state where over 65% of students aren’t meeting grade-level math standards.

A decade later, her research advocating for delaying instruction of Algebra I until 9th grade underpinned the San Francisco Unified School District’s 2014 decision to stop teaching the course in middle school. (SFUSD will reinstate the course for middle schoolers in the upcoming 2024-25 school year, following years of criticism and lawsuits from parents.) She was one of just five authors responsible for drafting the original CMF in 2021 — the final version of which was approved by the state’s education board in July — and participated in the first and second of four revisions to the framework. She also runs an education nonprofit, youcubed, that creates mathematics course materials it claims have “impacted” over 400 million students.

A landmark study of the algebra delay Boaler pushed on SFUSD in the name of helping “students from underserved communities” found the policy disadvantaged high-achieving students and did little to help those already struggling. Specifically, the authors found that “large ethnoracial [enrollment] gaps” in both AP and advanced math courses “did not change” after Boaler's reforms, while overall enrollment in AP Calculus — which requires a strong foundation in algebra — initially fell sharply. Subsequent reforms allowing students to enroll in summer Geometry and Algebra II/Pre-Calculus courses attenuated this drop, but did nothing to alter the persistent disparities in black and Hispanic enrollment in AP math, which was the supposed point of Boaler's reforms.

Fortunately for Boaler, her children are unaffected by this bad policy; instead of sending them to local public schools, she enrolled them in a $48,000-a-year private school that, according to publicly available course material, offers Algebra I to all its middle schoolers. And though Boaler writes often of her desire to bridge “indefensible racial and social inequities” in math performance, she charged an underfunded minority school district $5,000 an hour for consulting services that included seven sessions for a total fee of $65,000. (When Jelani Nelson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, tweeted about her exorbitant consulting fees, Boaler responded that his “sharing of private details” was “being taken up by police and lawyers.”)

Elsewhere, Boaler also seems to misrepresent her academic credentials. She frequently presents herself as a “mathematics professor” at Stanford, and promotional material for an upcoming book describes her as a “Stanford researcher, mathematics professor, and leading expert on math learning.” But her Stanford academic profile only shows her as ever being a part of the Graduate School of Education faculty, and says she has a Ph.D. in mathematics education, not mathematics.

But this behavior, cringe-inducing though it is, could be excused if not for Boaler’s pattern of dramatically misrepresenting citations throughout her published work. Other academics began ringing alarm bells about her dishonesty back in 2006, when a team of mathematicians accused Boaler of “grossly exaggerat[ing]” research she claimed supported heterogeneous classes. The complaint came on the heels of Boaler’s publication of a study claiming students at a predominantly Hispanic high school in California (which she called “Railside”) outperformed students at two more affluent, predominantly white schools due to reforms like heterogeneous classes. But when three math professors (including James Milgram, a fellow Stanford faculty member) analyzed the larger dataset Boaler had selectively cited, they found the data actually supported the opposite of Boaler’s conclusion: Railside students underperformed their affluent peers on nearly every metric — including AP and SAT outcomes and California State University entry-level math skills tests — except on an Algebra I test, where results were mixed.

Shortly after this debunking went live, Boaler left Stanford to take a gig at the University of Sussex, in the U.K. She only formally responded to the accusations about the “Railside” study years later in a long post claiming the mathematicians “engaged in a range of tactics to discredit me and damage my work.” Her response addressed none of their substantive criticism, though it did insinuate that one author’s alleged use of an unspecified “highly offensive racial slur . . . when discussing issues of equity” in the early 2000s may have motivated the critique.

More recently, Brian Conrad, a professor of mathematics at Stanford, extensively documented misrepresented citations in the CMF, many of which have now been directly linked to Boaler’s research, thanks to the anonymous complaint published last week. For instance, Conrad points out that the CMF draft co-authored by Boaler cites a study (“Burris et al 2006”) that purportedly shows positive outcomes for students placed in heterogeneous classes in middle school. But the framework’s authors never tell readers that the Burris study examined the effects of teaching Algebra I to all 8th grade students — exactly the policy the framework, which advocates for delaying Algebra I until high school, argues against. Nor do the framework authors mention the fact that the intervention described in Burris included extra math workshops available to all students during the school week.

Per the complaint published last week, this CMF misrepresentation of the Burris study appears nearly directly lifted from a post Boaler wrote for youcubed in 2017, in which Boaler cites the study as proof of the connection between de-tracking students and raising achievement levels, while also omitting to mention the fact that all students were placed in Algebra I in eighth grade and offered additional support.

But this example is just one of over 30 claims of alleged citation misrepresentation the complaint links directly back from the CMF to Boaler’s research. (It also details many other instances of citation misrepresentation in Boaler’s research that aren’t directly connected to the framework.)

Though Boaler may face few consequences for misrepresenting her own research and that of others, one thing is clear: The California Math Framework she played a central role in shaping will affect the education of the almost 6 million children enrolled in public schools throughout the state. It should be repealed and re-evaluated immediately. The revelations of her deception may be satisfying to those who have called her lack of integrity out for years, but they will be cold comfort to the struggling students her reforms will hurt.

–Sanjana Friedman