aWOKEning
PRIVATE SCHOOL breaking out at private schools on their Facebook page, most of the comments are pretty unsympathetic... “Well maybe you take your child and your $30,000 elsewhere,” Neily paraphrases. What these public-school parents would rightly scoff at if they knew... is that most of the private schools’ parents’ protests these days actually cost closer to $60,000 per year. Plus, the contracts that private-school parents sign when they enroll their kids in the first place typically include a clause declaring their support for the principles of diversity and inclusion, Neily’s colleague Asra Nomani points out. The anti-racist pledge that spurred Gutmann’s letter, for instance, amplified and added new language – dismantling systemic racism – to the boiler-plate lingo that schools like Brearley already use, and that parents like him already signed. Nomani is a former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent and Georgetown professor, and she’s also the author of fiercely independent books on feminism and Islam. Her work was informed in part by her being both a single mother and a Muslim – which made her the enemy of conservatives in her faith tradition and the target of death threats. Undaunted, she led an investigation into her friend and Journal colleague Danny Pearl’s kidnapping and murder by Islamists. In describing the spirit she brings to her work, she’s called herself an “overambitious child of immigrants.” More self-aware than some parents I’ve met, she readily admits she’s approached her son’s education in the Fairfax County school system with the same uncommon dedication
and doggedness she brought to her work. So, when he tested into Alexandria’s Thomas Jefferson High School – a STEM-focused (science, technology, engineering, and math) magnet school, routinely ranked as one of the best public schools in the country – she dove into the PTA and, naturally, took over the newsletter. When, in June 2020, the school announced new admissions and advanced placement reforms in the interest of “equity,” Nomani couldn’t help but notice. The Islamists she encountered in her reporting use the same terms to justify relegating women to the back of mosques. In an uneasy challenge to its equity score, Thomas Jefferson High School already skews majority and minority, but most students are Asian and, according to Nomani, most are the children of immigrants if not immigrants themselves. When the Black Lives Matter movement and discussions of intersectional racism appeared in coursework while students were home during the pandemic, Nomani doubted the moral sincerity behind these topics’ sudden inclusion in the curriculum. She and other concerned parents organized into a group called “Coalition for TJ” and soon learned that what worried them was underway all over the country. Nomani taught and studied cross-cultural communications, and she reads most of the consultant-led anti-racist curricula cropping up in schools as a reductive race-based treatment of cultural difference. “I’m what’s now called a person of color, a Brown Muslim immigrant. I check all these different boxes. I’m liberal and a Democrat, and I disagree with the idea that we can create a new
36
June 2021
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online