Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:It’s not the source; it’s the information.
That’s the issue. Everything that’s been ascribed to the “Glasgow Group” is true including Rodney’s comments.
The only issue is the motivation and the impact.
Any mainstream news outlet that would attempt to address this in a measured manner would be excoriated.
The Free Beacon stories illustrate a complete lack of awareness about how accreditation functions in independent schools and how schools seek to improve within a small community.
I've worked in this world for more than a decade. I also have an experience that I think will provide a good parallel. My friend runs a restaurant in the DC area. In the first year of the pandemic, she hired a consultant who works with the health department to advise her on how to make her restaurant safer for customers. Now, the health department has authority over whether her restaurant is deemed clean enough to stay open; is it a conflict of interest to hire someone who also worked there to advise on COVID safety?
Accreditation is a process that's designed to help schools improve their ability to meet their mission. It's not punitive. Suggestions for improvement come from all members of the accreditation committee, which is composed of people from other schools. Fundamentally, these suggestions are designed to identify areas where the school is not living up to families' expectations.
With all due respect, I think you are viewing this NAIS through rose colored glasses. To analogize hiring a DEI consultant to a safety/health consultant at a restaurant is to assume that what constitutes DEI improvements are objectively measured like how many food poisoning cases have there been at a restaurant. There are substantial philosophical differences as the proper role of DEI and, more importantly, what is an "improvement" and how to implement and measure it. When an accreditation body is largely captured by a small group of large DEI consulting firms, that philosophical perspective becomes institutionalized in the accreditation process and independent schools are more likely to follow a common approach. If the accreditation process is really identifying areas where the schools are not living up to family expectations and intervening to improve them, I would have expected some very critical remarks by NAIS of the DEI policies of schools like Dalton in NY(and others) before there was a parent rebellion that ousted the leadership. If such corrective measures were proscribed and ignored by leadership, that would be interesting to know but I'd be very surprised.
DEI is much more complicated than simply diversity in admissions at independent schools. Will schools teach Robin D'Angelo style anti-racism (anyone white is born racist into a racist society -- you can't help it), Ibam Kendi type anti-racism (anytime you find a policy has a disparate impact on different racial groups it is because of racism -- never clear if that's because of here and now racism or past racism (whether systemic or individual), and there are no solutions to that other than taking "equitable" steps to ensure proportional outcomes, which sure seems like quotas. Will they require students to sort themselves into affinity groups as school required exercises? Will they choose who can teach a specific course based on the person's race? I once asked a private school top administrator about how many students identified as various religions, various letters in the LGBTQ spectrum, etc. (never mind viewpoints). Answer -- we track categories required by NAIS and (at that time; I don't about today), and NAIS did not require those categories to be tracked. This is complicated stuff.
Schools view NAIS accreditation (or through local affiliates) as essential for attracting students and maintaining a floor of credibility in college placements. NAIS is also a market exchange for jobs at independent schools, a way that schools showcase their successes to colleagues and win the respect of their peers, and a training center for some basic financial management, governance and other tools (like a trade association). Living up to families' expectations? I just didn't see that in the dozen or so years my kids were in privates.