Last April, Yolande Beckles stood outside the California State Capitol building and addressed a crowd of thousands. “We are here today to ensure that the governor gets the message that the $300 million in the ‘Equity Multiplier’ goes to black students, not cappuccino, not lemonade, not light coffee, but hot chocolate,” she bellowed in a broad East London accent. The speech was remarkable, not only in its content but also in its symbolic meaning. It represented Beckles’s complete reinvention from disgraced British reality TV star and fraudster — who fled the U.K. for Los Angeles nearly two decades ago with 19 standing court judgements levying almost £70,000 in fines at her defunct businesses and a front-page exposé revealing that she had defrauded underprivileged schoolkids of £12,000, and who was then sued by a landlady in LA who claimed Beckles “ruined her life” by stealing her belongings and refusing to pay almost $20,000 in rent — to respected California education policy consultant.

Beckles, a British woman, spoke at the rally in her capacity as president of the National Association of African American Parents and Youth (NAAAPY), a nonprofit she founded in 2022 to “empower Black Parents, families and Guardians to become educated, trained advocates for their children and students.” The authors of the recently approved California Math Framework (CMF) — most infamous for advocating against teaching most gifted middle-schoolers algebra in the name of equity — consulted her as an “engagement expert,” and last month she was invited to give a talk on “Unleashing Black/Brown Family Power in Students' Math Thinking” at the California Mathematics Council (CMC) annual symposium.

Beckles frequently collaborates with fellow Brit Jo Boaler, the Stanford mathematics education professor who played a key role in shaping the CMF and who has recently come under intense scrutiny for allegedly engaging in academic fraud. (See our write-up on the Boaler allegations here.) Beckles wrote a blurb for Boaler’s forthcoming book “Math-ish,” in which she thanked Boaler for “including us in the math Equity story of change,” and next month the two will co-host a webinar at Stanford University on “Building Mathematical Mindset-Strategies for Parents & Guardians.” Boaler and Beckles also got together in Sacramento last July to “celebrate the unanimous passing of the CMF” and again in Bakersfield at the CMC symposium, where they were both invited speakers.

But where Beckles is considered an “engagement expert” by California policy makers, and a math education specialist by Stanford, in her native U.K. she is better known as a “disgraced education ‘guru’ and reality TV star who vanished after becoming embroiled in a string of financial scandals,” per a 2010 article in The Independent that chronicled her transatlantic misadventures. Beckles shot to stardom in 2006 when the BBC aired a documentary, “Don’t Mess with Miss Beckles,” which followed her attempts to improve the academic performance of disaffected teenagers in the suburbs of London. One of the participants in the documentary later told The Guardian that he felt “manipulated” by the BBC and refused to see or speak with Beckles again.

In 2007, investigative journalists uncovered her involvement in a long trail of financial scandals in the U.K. charity sector — including 19 court judgements levying fines totaling almost £70,000 at her various defunct businesses, unpaid debts of £125,000 (some of which she left former employees to pay), personal expenses financed with work credit cards, and unauthorized personal loans totaling at least £10,000. The investigation culminated in a front-page story in London’s Evening Standard that year revealing that Beckles had taken £12,000 from underprivileged children in East London to fund “an educational trip” to the Caribbean that never happened, and then went to South Korea, where she reportedly attended a convention of the Moonies, a controversial religious movement often described as a cult. A friend of one of the British creditors Beckles allegedly swindled subsequently set up a website — “Beckleswatch” — to “inform and warn new business partners, investors and collaborators about Yo’s former life and activities.”

How Beckles managed to dodge the fraud charges and reinvent herself as an influential education policy consultant in California isn’t clear. In 2007, after she was summoned to court by a private school in southeast London for allegedly not paying her daughter’s tuition, Beckles decamped to Los Angeles, where she set up an education nonprofit, Think Global Kids, which quickly came under scrutiny by the administrators from the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) for mismanaging funds at a local public elementary school. (Think Global Kids has since been suspended from business operations by the California Franchise Tax Board, either for not filing its tax returns or not paying its taxes.) Beckles was also hit with a lawsuit from Olivia Goodson-Shields, her former landlady in Los Angeles who claimed Beckles owed her almost $20,000 in unpaid rent and bills. According to The Independent, Goodson-Shields contacted the Los Angeles police department “after watching a video on the Think Global Kids website, in which [Beckles] appears to be wearing a distinctive necklace similar to one that had mysteriously disappeared from [Goodson-Shields’s] home.”

“To say that woman has ruined my life is an understatement,” Goodson-Shields told The Independent. "Because of her, I've lost my home and my car. Everything about her is fishy, and when I saw the necklace I wasn't in the least bit surprised. I'm amazed that she is still in the country, let alone in business."

Undeterred by this legal action, Beckles pivoted from Think Global Kids and, in 2009, finagled a position as vice chair of the District Advisory Committee, a panel of LAUSD parents that advised the district on how to spend federal Title I funds, which are designated to help economically disadvantaged students. After the committee was disbanded in 2011 by LAUSD administrators who determined its members “failed to adhere to acceptable norms of conduct,” Beckles and other members sued the district, alleging that administrators had violated their First Amendment rights. The school district responded that the committee had “no standing to sue” and its members, including Beckles, could not show “any right to control over the budgetary process of spending billions of dollars of taxpayer money.” The court sided with the district in 2014.

The next year, Beckles incorporated yet another nonprofit — The Knowledge Shop Los Angeles — that “offers a variety of affordable educational programs” to “empower and develop the families of Los Angeles.” (Application forms for the two programs listed on The Knowledge Shop’s website are both broken, and the site shows no events scheduled for this calendar year. Odd, considering Beckles lists this as her only full-time place of employment on LinkedIn.) Through the nonprofit, Beckles published a document supporting the proposed draft of the CMF, which advocates against teaching most middle schoolers algebra in the name of “equity,” saying that because of the framework’s focus on inclusion, “it has been the target of a well-funded misinformation campaign.”

Through her “math equity” work, Beckles appears to have caught the attention of several of the authors involved in shaping the CMF and has integrated herself further into California’s K-12 policy world. In addition to her roles heading up The Knowledge Shop and NAAAPY, she also currently serves as vice chair of LAUSD’s Parent Advisory Committee, which provides advice on school policy to the district’s board of education and superintendent. And in public comment before the California Board of Education in support of the final draft of the CMF (which passed unanimously), Beckles thanked the “framework authors [who] listened to…engagement experts like [herself].”

Amid all this publicity, it isn’t clear where her income is coming from. Her LinkedIn lists her main job as CEO of The Knowledge Shop, but according to The Knowledge Shop’s most recently available 990 tax return, it is nearly $32,000 in debt and pays Beckles nothing. (NAAAPY’s 990 isn’t available yet.) This, more than anything, may explain her recent involvement in math-equity work, where there is an enormous amount of money to be made. Following the passage of the CMF last year, California State Superintendent Tony Thurmond promised to introduce legislation to funnel up to $500 million to “professional development for those teaching math and reading.” Perhaps Beckles is eyeing a consulting contract with a local school district along the lines of the $5,000 an hour contract her collaborator Jo Boaler received.

In any event, it’s shocking that Beckles, whose public history of fraud is almost entirely accessible through a quick Google search, has managed to position herself as a respected math education policy consultant in California. But perhaps we should not be surprised given that Boaler, who was recently accused of showing “reckless disregard for accuracy” in her published academic work, was the principal architect of the document now guiding the math education of almost 6 million kids across the state. Increasingly, it appears that the only guiding principle for public policy making in California is: May the best scammer win.

– Sanjana Friedman