New York
The Social Order
In late January, months of feuding at New York City’s Dalton School spilled into public view. In an anonymous letter, a group of alumni and parents wrote that the school they had long loved was abandoning real education in favor of “an obsessive focus on race and identity” in every class.
In particular, the letter’s authors blame Pollyanna, a New York-based Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) nonprofit. The consultancy’s “racial literacy” curriculum, the letter claimed, “has already permeated Dalton classes from social studies to science” and contributed to “some of the worst abuses this year”—incidents like the one in which a Jewish student was forced to play the “racist cop” in science class, or the art class on “decentering whiteness.”