The kids are not alright
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Why Private Schools Have Gone Woke
“Meet the National Association of Independent Schools, which enforces diversity, equity, and inclusion standards as a requirement for accreditation”
Excerpts:
The push for so-called diversity and inclusion at private schools has prompted pushback from parents, who say the new antiracism is anything but.
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But families seeking less ideological schools have been struggling to find them, several parents told the Washington Free Beacon, because all the accreditors mandate the same ideology. The rapid restructuring of curricula is less the result of a free market responding to customers and more the result of demands by the National Association of Independent Schools, a centralized, self-dealing bureaucracy that has largely eliminated parent choice.
"The association is a cartel," one parent said. "You think you have a choice but you don’t."
Two forces hold that cartel together: diversity consultants who benefit from the accreditation establishment, and parents who are unwilling to challenge it because it serves as a pipeline to elite colleges. At the behest of the association, accreditors create demand for the consultancies, which in turn create demand for the association’s services, including its own DEI resources. Parents dissatisfied with this feedback loop nonetheless face pressures to tolerate it: Opting out could jeopardize their kids’ ticket to the Ivy League.
The accreditation bureaucracy has implications for school choice, which some conservatives have framed as the solution to radicalism in public schools. The idea that vouchers will provide an escape hatch from woke education "is far too blithe," said Max Eden, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. "It ignores the structural reality that bodies with veto power have been captured by wokeness."
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Parents who speak out risk violating the terms of their enrollment contract. A 2020 presentation from the association notes that member schools are adopting a "shape up or ship out" approach to "parent comportment." Ohio’s Columbus Academy, for example, recently expelled three students after their parents criticized the school’s critical race theory-inspired curriculum.
All this poses a problem for market-based education reform: For many parents, there is no market. Far from offering more choice than public schools, private schools may offer even less.
Some school-choice advocates are beginning to realize this. "Given the reality of accrediting bodies, I would advise state legislators against implementing voucher programs that send money only to accredited schools," the American Enterprise Institute’s Eden said. He noted that a few Republican-controlled states have jettisoned vouchers in favor of education savings accounts, which can be spent on non-accredited schools. Another approach would be to start alternative accreditation bodies with less ideological criteria. In New England, the group Parents United has looked into doing just that.
The challenge for both proposals is the college admissions process. In interviews with the Free Beacon, multiple parents expressed concern that elite universities would not look kindly on schools outside the accreditation establishment, which could handicap their kids’ odds of getting in. "The better the school, the more woke it is," one mother said—"because all the best colleges are woke." If Dalton is held hostage by the accreditors, parents are held hostage by the meritocracy.
That means school choice alone may not bring about systemic change; rather, systemic change may be a prerequisite for school choice.
"Conservatives have been inclined to be defensive," said Samuel Goldman, a political theorist who has argued for "educational pluralism." "They assume these institutions are basically healthy, that there are just some subversive influences that need to be resisted." But if those influences already dominate the institutions, pluralism will require a more offensive approach.
"It’s not clear school choice is enough to overcome this pernicious ideology," said Lindsey Burke, the director of education policy at the Heritage Foundation. "We need to fight on multiple fronts."
Depressing
