The Pollyanna Principals: How one consultancy capitalized on New York prep schools’ mad fad for “anti-racism”
by Charles Fain Lehman
City Journal
March 15, 2021
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.”
Pollyanna may be new to outraged parents, but it is familiar to the New York prep school community. Over the past several years, Pollyanna has spread quietly through the toniest schools in New York City and across the country. Buoyed by last summer’s protests, it tripled its clientele to over 60 schools in 2020, stretching from Harvard-Westlake in Los Angeles to remote Vermont Academy. That includes some 25 schools in New York—hyper-exclusive institutions like Dalton, Horace Mann, Spence, and the Hunter College Elementary School.
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