This Harvard-Westlake parents’ group is one of many organizing quietly around the country to fight what it describes as an ideological movement that has taken over their schools. Another poses a question to the group: “How does focusing a spotlight on race fix how kids talk to one another? Why can’t they just all be Wolverines?” (Harvard-Westlake has declined to comment.) “They are making my son feel like a racist because of the pigmentation of his skin,” one mother says. What he has a problem with is a movement that tells his children that America is a bad country and that they bear collective racial guilt. He says he doesn’t have a problem with the school making greater efforts to redress past wrongs, including by bringing more minority voices into the curriculum. The stories some have expressed since the summer seem totally legitimate,” says one of the fathers. “I grew up in L.A., and the Harvard School definitely struggled with diversity issues. Most of all, they worry that the school’s new plan to become an “anti-racist institution”- unveiled this July, in a 20-page document-is making their kids fixate on race and attach importance to it in ways that strike them as grotesque. They say that their children tell them they’re afraid to speak up in class. So it strikes them as something more than ironic that a school that costs more than $40,000 a year-a school with Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right hand, and Sarah Murdoch, wife of Lachlan and Rupert’s daughter-in-law, on its board-is teaching students that capitalism is evil.įor most parents, the demonization of capitalism is the least of it. These are two-career couples who credit their own success not to family connections or inherited wealth but to their own education. By the standards of Harvard-Westlake, they are average. These are the rebels: well-off Los Angeles parents who send their children to Harvard-Westlake, the most prestigious private school in the city.īy normal American standards, they are quite wealthy. In a backyard behind a four-bedroom home, ten people sat in a circle of plastic Adirondack chairs, eating bags of Skinny Pop. So one recent weekend, on a leafy street in West Los Angeles, they gathered in person and invited me to join. They say that they could face profound repercussions if anyone knew they were talking.īut the situation of late has become too egregious for emails or complaining on conference calls. They are usually coordinating soccer practices and carpools, but now they come together to strategize. The dissidents use pseudonyms and turn off their videos when they meet for clandestine Zoom calls.