Ze'ev Wurman

Ze'ev Wurman, a software engineer and influential participant in several educational content standards debates beginning in the 1990s, died on Saturday, April 29, 2023, from complications from relapsed lymphoma. He was 73.

Ze'ev (Polish name Wlodzimierz) was born in 1950 in Warsaw, Poland, to an accomplished and autodidactic Jewish family. His father, Leon Wurman, was born in 1911 in Kurow, a village in eastern Poland, and had been a house painter before World War II. After the war Leon worked as a self-taught civil engineer responsible for rebuilding and reorganizing several quarters of Warsaw, including the Old City. Leon was mere weeks away from finishing his formal civil engineering degree when he and his family left for Israel on June 2, 1957. Without a formal degree, he resumed house painting in Israel in his late 40s, despite fluently speaking four languages-Polish, Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew-and his self-taught ability in civil engineering. Ze'ev's mother, Irena Wurman (n?e Perel, 1914 in Warsaw), was a government official in Poland who also completed a law degree. She spoke Polish, Russian, and Yiddish fluently.

Upon Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939, Leon and Irena fled from Warsaw to Russia. It was in Russia that the family stopped believing in the communist system, having seen it first hand. When Stalin permitted the refugees of 1939 to return to Poland, Leon and Irena returned to Warsaw in 1946 with their first son, Israel. They intended to continue on to British Palestine, but the Soviet satellite government emerged with the Polish elections of 1948 and emigration was closed off until October 1956, after the Stalinist terror had ended. With the rise in antisemitism and disappointment in Communism among the Polish Jews, some 50,000 Jews left Poland in a five-year period, including Leon, Irena, Israel, and their second son, Ze'ev, then seven years old.

Ze'ev thrived in school in Israel. One friend who grew up with Ze'ev in these years said that "in many eyes he was a genius." In 1968, he graduated from Hahashmonaim high school in Bat Yam, Israel. That year he also won the annual award of the Israeli Chemical Society. He then enrolled in the Israeli Institute of Technology ("Technion"), where he graduated with an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering in 1972.

In 1971 or '72, Ze'ev reconnected with a childhood friend from Poland, Grazyna, in Vienna. She tells the story of how they "went to the amusement park where we came across that shooting range," where "Wlodeczek"-the term of endearment for Wlodzimierz-"decided to show his skills." Grazyna reports the outcome: "The vendor had to close up for the day after he got done. I had a bunch of bears, and he was smiling and said, 'This is why we won the war.' He meant in 1967."

After obtaining his Bachelor of Science degree in 1972, Ze'ev served in the Israel Defense Forces, including serving in the Sinai during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. After the war, he led a three-person team to develop technology that improved Israel's defense capabilities, for which he was awarded the Pras Bitachon Israel (Israel Defense Award) in 1977. In 1978, Ze'ev married Hadassah (Dassi) Haya Sohar (Sonnenreich), whose own parents fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s for what was then British Palestine.

Ze'ev completed his master's degree in 1980, also in electrical engineering, and worked for the company "Time Machine" between 1979-1982. At Time Machine, Ze'ev was an assistant hardware manager working to develop a cache subsystem for a 32-bit "super-minicomputer" and various CAD hardware and software tools. From 1982-1985 he worked for IBM's Israel Scientific Center and was an adjunct professor at the Technion, where he taught logic design and signal processing.

In 1985, he immigrated to the United States and settled with Hadassah and their first two children, Gilead and Oded, in Palo Alto, California. For the next fifteen years, he worked for Silvar-Lisco, where he designed and managed CAD software; Amdahl, where he was the architect for a hardware simulation accelerator; and DynaChip, where he led the software development groups for field-programmable gate arrays. All three were Silicon Valley technology software companies in the semiconductor industry. In the early 2000s, he worked as a chief software architect at two startups, eASIC and MonolithIC 3D Inc.

In the mid-1990s, Ze'ev, now with four sons in Palo Alto public schools (his twin boys, Ilan and Eytan, were born in 1987), began a second career as an advocate for rigorous educational content standards in K-12 education. He along with other parents in the Palo Alto Unified School District noticed that the district was deploying what was called "discovery learning" math; students were also being increasingly encouraged to use calculators rather than pencil and paper; and the school district also proposed eliminating laning, which would have limited the opportunities for advanced students to take advanced classes.

In response to these and related trends, some two dozen parents formed the group "Honest Open Logical Debate" (HOLD) in February 1995. Ze'ev was on the steering committee. HOLD established a website the next month, and soon there were close to 500 households on the HOLD mailing list-at a time when the Internet and e-mail were just beginning to be used for political organizing. HOLD initiated the 1990s "math wars" in California: Its efforts brought hundreds of parents to packed school board meetings.

The math wars soon spread throughout California and the nation. In 1996, Ze'ev was appointed to the California state math curriculum framework committee that wrote new rigorous math guidelines, and subsequently to the item-writing panel for California's math achievement test. As a result of Ze'ev contributions to these efforts, two-thirds of students were taking Algebra I in eighth grade by 2010.

In 2007, when Bill Evers-another Palo Altan, HOLD leader, and dear friend of Ze'ev's-was appointed by President George W. Bush to be an Assistant Secretary in the U.S. Department of Education, Ze'ev joined him in the department's Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development (OPEPD). Consistent with his independent, and some say stubborn and contrarian, thinking, Ze'ev had never been a partisan of, nor registered with, any political party, so the office dealing with political appointments refused to make him a political appointee. The solution was to appoint Ze'ev as a senior adviser instead. Ze'ev had a variety of responsibilities at OPEPD, including overseeing the office's research service, which was staffed by career civil servants. His careful efforts to aid the service improved the quality of the research and made for better relations between political appointees and civil servants.

After his service in the Bush Administration, Ze'ev became a Senior Fellow with the American Principles Project, where he analyzed the mathematics drafts of the Common Core national curriculum-content standards for the Pioneer Institute and for the State of California. In the summer of 2010, he served on the California Academic Content Standards Commission, and began traveling around the country with other scholarly critics of Common Core. In this period, he was also briefly a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and in 2021 he joined the Independent Institute in Oakland, where he continued writing about education and content standards.

After initially beating lymphoma in 2020, Ze'ev became ill again in early 2023. His disease progressed rapidly. Although he did not want to die in a hospital, he agreed to go in his last days because he knew that he would not be able to see all of his sons if he stayed at home. One was across the country in Boston, another was about to participate in an important trial (Ze'ev told him to go and not cut corners because of him), and a third son was supporting his wife during her own cancer surgery.

All four sons were able to see Ze'ev before he died. His last words, about twenty-four hours before his death, were about whether the world was a "continuity" or whether it was "atomism." He concluded that it was continuity.

Ze'ev is survived by his wife of over 44 years, Hadassah; his four sons Gilead, Oded, Ilan, and Eytan; his six grandchildren Ari, Ronen, Noa, Miki, Daniel, and Selah; and his older brother, Israel.

Ze'ev Wurman, January 19, 1950 - April 29, 2023.

Statements from Friends

James Stergios, executive director of the Pioneer Institute, says that Ze'ev was "brilliant, mischievous in the best way, warm, wise."

Tom Adams, former Director of the curriculum division of the California Department of Education, says that "even when people disagreed with him, they knew he had a powerful mind and was a thoughtful person."

Bill Evers says that the Ze'ev was his best friend for many decades, "a true Mensch, as well an ever-flowing fountain of knowledge about math."

Andy Smarick, former chair of the Maryland Higher Education Commission and former president of the Maryland State Board of Education, who worked with Ze'ev in OPEPD, said working with him was "a huge pleasure," and that he was "kind and funny and generous and curious."

Wayne Bishop, a retired professor of mathematics at Cal State Los Angeles, writes that the Ze'ev's "quiet but always solid contributions to the battle for good mathematics education" in California and across the country had been "so good for so long."

Sandy Kress, the Bush Administration's negotiator on the No Child Left Behind Act, says that Ze'ev "knew what was right, and he worked hard to advance it"; he "was a 'good guy,' quietly but firmly committed to doing the right thing in the right way, firmly but decently."

Janet Nicholas, a former member of the California State Board of Education, says that Ze'ev was "a brilliant analyst, mathematician, and exemplary statistician" who remained "steadfast in his focus on improving American public education," and that "civility and generosity remained his guideposts." She adds that after his return from DC, they would meet periodically at museums in San Francisco. "It was during those wide ranging wonderful conversations, that I came to fully appreciate what a polymath he was. I will miss him dearly."

Edith Cohen writes, Ze'ev "was . . . an amazing man. Logical, principled, caring, eloquent. What a loss."

Alla Korinevskaya writes that she met Ze'ev at the California State Board of Education decades ago, and have kept in touch since. "He was one of the most interesting and original thinkers I've met, passionate about math education and his family. I will miss our conversations, [his] sense of humor, his kindness and everything about him."

Pattie Levinson writes, "I wanted to tell you how sorry I am to hear about Ze'ev's death. I hadn't seen him in at least 6-7 years. He was obviously brilliant, but more than his brilliance, I remember him as such a thoughtful and kind man. A great guy, gone too soon."

Grazyna Wojnarowicz tells the following story from their youth: "My first memory of him goes back to 1953. We went on vacation to Miedzywodzie on the Baltic with my mom and his parents. His Mom, whom I called auntie Fela. (I know You knew her as Irena.) In those days, the beach was closed early in the evening and raked by heavy machinery. There were big signs warning trespassers not to step on it. Probably some Soviet regulations to prevent people from leaving for the west, maybe by kayak. Wlodeczek [Ze'ev] was not happy with the rules, but nobody was watching. He took me by the hand and went down to the beach through the dunes. We were running around, leaving tiny little footsteps all over the forbidden territory. Our mothers got concerned and finally found us. The border patrol fortunately laughed it off."