It’s the system. Hunter and Burisma. It’s the system. Kojo Annan and oil-for-food. It’s the system. IRS receiving $46B in extra funding for enforcement to rake in $4.6B. System. Saint Ann’s (NY) knowingly hiring an ex-con later accused of soliciting child porn from students and “shaming” students and parents who raised concerns. System. Sandy Springs Friends School (MD) dumping poisonous headmaster/DEI consultant/mani-pedi enthusiast Rodney Glasgow (Gilman School, MD) only for Glasgow to be named Interim Associate Director of Friends Council on Education with the National Association of Friends Schools and preside proudly at the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) People of Color Conference (POCC). System. Horace Mann (NY) Headmaster Tom Kelly groveling in submission to feed his own ambition to the tune of $1.8M a year. System. These frauds are the result of rotten systems. In education, rotten systems are the result of accreditation. To save Independent X School, we must remove it from the cartel system of NAIS. END ACCREDITATION.
Apropos of the season of Clarissa Ward and Luigi Mangione (Gilman School, MD), NAIS has quaintly fabricated another outrage and apology so they can receive praise while escaping accountability. Is anyone still buying these third-grade level productions? If you missed it, let us unravel what the cartel of accreditation most recently wrought.
Like prior years, the 2024 NAIS People of Color Conference and Student Diversity Leadership Conference (SDLC) featured racist, politically motivated, anti-Semitic speakers pushing Marxist ideology under the comical guise of “belonging.” Like prior speakers at NAIS events and NAIS Schools, speakers at the 2024 NAIS POCC characterized Israel’s war in Gaza as genocide and questioned Israel’s right to exist. Like last year’s SDLC, Jewish students reported being upset and feeling unsafe. Like last year’s POCC and SDLC, there are recordings of the speakers. (Sidenote: After enabling years of cell phones distracting children in school and making them anti-social, NAIS did not push member schools to ban cell phones based on the publication of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. The nationwide ban came from NAIS’ fear of students recording communications NAIS does not want us to hear.) But unlike last year, the ADL immediately posted a letter denouncing NAIS for its speakers. And unlike last year, NAIS immediately posted an apology that was immediately picked up by state legacy media New York Times and CNN.
The NYT piece does include some notable points albeit made by the speakers accidentally. After being sent a video recording of POCC headliner Suzanne Barakat’s speech, Milken Community School (CA) Headmaster Sarah Shulkind is quoted saying, “Even if this was her perspective,” “what was she doing talking about this at an educational conference?” First, is Shulkind really claiming ignorance at NAIS and Milken obsessing over politics? Second, why indeed? Why must NAIS infuse politics in everything and force it onto NAIS Schools for accreditation? (Recall NAIS oversees and sets criteria for accreditation through regional accreditation organizations.) Oh, but lest we forget NAIS Schools breed next gen Victoria Nulands (Choate, CT) and Antony Blinkens (Dalton, NY) to ensure the geopolitical order of relocating biolabs from Ukraine to Africa. Or something to that affect. Just your average day in the CIA vetting NAIS School classes. Ironically, POCC headliner Ruha Benjamin whined that Jewish students’ reactions “reflects a failure on the part of their teachers and administrators to equip them with the ability to wrestle with difficult realities.” That’s rich coming from a Princeton professor profiting from demagoguing endless oppression Olympics.
These couple clueless comments aside, the immediacy of the coordinated reactions confirmed what we knew from the moment the initial ADL announcement came out - it was all planned. Before we read NAIS President Debra Wilson’s letter claiming NAIS would vet future POCC speakers’ addresses or Jonathan Greenblatt’s statement representing the ADL would work with NAIS on future conferences, we could discern the entire production had all the hallmarks of NAIS PR partner The Jane Group. We have called out NAIS’ scams to countless in the media for too long, and the national press has covered stories about outrage over Marxist ideology in NAIS Schools – including specifically anti-Semitic speakers and specifically at NAIS POCC, for too long to believe immediate response by the ADL, NAIS, CNN, and the NYTimes was organic. Wilson’s statement of regret was as authentic as George Stephanopoulos’ (Spence, NY parent) and with as much remorse as the Spence Lady Memers. NAIS already reserves the right to vet registrants and has kicked parents out of POCC just for being parents. Repeat after us: it is NEVER a mistake. NAIS knows exactly what it is doing to perpetuate its cartel on accreditation. These are the consequences of accreditation.
Fraud, waste, abuse, deceit, anti-Semitism, coordinated PR campaigns – the consequences of accreditation are not merely ideological indoctrination. About 8,000 people attended the 2024 NAIS POCC and SDLC. Dalton (NY) must be swimming in annual fund donations to pay registration fees, airfare, hotel, and food costs for 48 POCC/SDLC attendees while paying for three headmasters. NAIS School tuitions that were $8,000 nearly 30 years ago are now $44,000. We don’t know what that is adjusted for inflation, but it seems like a hell of an increase. More than expenses, lack of transparency is the most damaging effect of accreditation. What do we really know about NAIS and its designs for our schools? NAIS School Parents are not considered members and cannot access any information behind the NAIS website member paywall we pay for with our tuition. Meanwhile NAIS’ wiki page has been sanitized, the Glasgow Group’s consultant bios are now password protected, and even Harvard’s not sharing admissions data anymore. When our schools are controlled by accreditation organizations, not even Christian schools offer an escape.
We are through with playing by the rules of someone else’s game. If we really want to Make Education Great Again in all its gilded glory, the first step is to cut ties with NAIS and END ACCREDITATION. It’s not about “choice” – we already have choice. It’s about sovereignty. A good start would be demanding Independent X School refrain from sending anyone to the 2025 NAIS POCC in Houston. In the meantime, keep sending your stories to us. Here are a few additional journalists to send your stories: Jon Levine jlevine1@nypost.com, Dana Kennedy dkennedy@nypost.com, Sarah Nir Sarah.Nir@nytimes.com, Spencer Lindquist SLindquist@dailywire.com, Libs of Tik Tok submissions@libsoftiktok.com, Aaron Sibarium sibarium@freebeacon.com.
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