The public blowup came in December, splashed across the pages of the New York Post: A handful of teachers at the Dalton School, one of New York City’s elite Upper East Side private schools, had written an eight-page, 24-point thought-starter document that aimed to reimagine Dalton’s approach to diversity and inclusion, bringing it more in line with the progressive facade it has long worn. The document was signed by more than 130 staff members of all races, including high-ranking department heads, teachers, and administrators. After a summer of nationwide protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd, and a widespread call to reexamine the role that institutionalized racism plays in every aspect of American life, the tidal wave had arrived at Dalton’s door.

Nor was the school alone; in June, two different groups of private school graduates launched the @blackatchapin and @blackatbrearley Instagram accounts, detailing the racism and microaggressions people of color experienced at the neighboring girls’ schools. Alums of color from other pedigreed schools across the East Coast—Spence, Sidwell Friends, Exeter—followed suit. On June 11, a group of Black Daltonians started @blackatdalton, and the school became a blip on a screen crowded with top-tier institutions hoping to talk, promise, pay, and, in rare cases, work their racial sins away.

The Dalton teachers’ suggestions had been written that summer, posted on an internal school forum for anyone with a faculty login to read. But it wasn’t until the Post presented them as a list of Marxist demands, rather than the aspirations they were conceived as, that the other shoe dropped. Shortly thereafter, a letter from a group of alumni and parents calling themselves “Loving Concern @ Dalton” began to make the rounds. Its authors decried the school’s “obsessive focus on race and identity” and wrote that Dalton’s ideology “is extremely exclusionary to those families (perhaps a majority of the Dalton community) who don’t identify as part of an oversimplified racial dichotomy in a beautiful and diverse world, or those who choose not to make their racial identity the centerpiece of…their children’s education.”

“Many of us do not feel welcome at Dalton anymore,” they wrote.

Most of the Dalton students and alumni of color I spoke to believe the letter represents a small portion of the community. Still, something ugly had bubbled to the surface. Tragedies like the police shooting of Daunte Wright in Minnesota—while the trial of the police officer who killed George Floyd unfolded miles away—have ensured that the topic of anti-Black racism continues to reverberate in classrooms across the country. But while the dust has settled at some of the other private schools that were thrust into the spotlight over the summer, it has continued to swirl at Dalton. Whether because it’s one of the few schools, public or private, that didn’t offer some form of in-person learning in 2020; or because it has portrayed itself as a leader in the realm of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI); or because head of school Jim Best has so publicly struggled to mediate the demands of various constituencies clamoring to be heard, Dalton has become a dramatic microcosm of the ideological tensions playing out at private schools across the country. (Shortly after the publication of this story, Best announced he would step down at the end of 2021.) 

At Dalton and elsewhere, a tug-of-war has erupted between students of color, who are increasingly represented, demanding change from insular leadership, and affluent parents pushing a return to the status quo—if it ever really went away in the first place; between the ideals these institutions have promised to uphold and their apparent unwillingness to make the kind of systemic change needed to achieve them; between those calling for transparency and those in charge, whose attempts to control the narrative have transformed what might have been feedback into blowback. Its resolution could answer the existential question haunting liberal private schools that have become substantially less white in the past two decades: Is diversity, equity, and inclusion even possible for a school that costs nearly $60,000 a year and still caters in word and deed to a societal upper echelon?

“A school like Dalton can’t be fully anti-racist and be Dalton,” W, a Black Dalton graduate—one of more than 30 private school students, alumni, parents, and faculty of color I spoke to for this story—wrote in a text message. “Rich white people send their kids there because it’s meant for rich white people—[because of] its exclusivity and difficulty to access. I’m sure more parents than want to admit probably think the school loses ‘value’ with an increase in a diverse student population. And all Black and brown kids are just happy to be there.”

Against the backdrop of antiracism dialogue, the debate last summer over when and how New York City schools should reopen during a pandemic was increasingly framed in racial terms. On one hand, reopening private schools in the fall while keeping public schools shuttered would further exacerbate the divide between the thousands of children who relied on the public school system for support. On the other, relegating some children to unsupervised, isolated remote learning while their peers were bolstered with tutors and pods was another stark reminder of how the wealthy had managed to insulate themselves from the pandemic. As the school year approached, many teachers argued that forcing educators and a support staff largely composed of people of color to risk their lives commuting was racist. By the end of the summer, most private schools had announced that they would start remote and gradually adopt a hybrid learning plan. Dalton was among the few that would be fully remote through the first semester.

Private school parents, including many who claimed to be from Dalton, blasted the decision in a thread on a New York City moms’ message board. “This is a complete and absolute failure by Dalton which prides itself on providing superior and progressive education to a diverse group of families,” wrote one. “Now they will be sitting kids in front of screens while the hedge funders are in pods in the Hamptons.”

Later in the thread, someone who identifies themselves as a Dalton parent asks: “Are any other parents considering leaving the school? We are. I don’t want to be too short-sighted, but I think the administration has shown its true colors here.” Two parents replied, “yes.” (Dalton’s spokesperson said the school will “meet and maintain our expected annual enrollment” for the next school year.)

By November, Dalton was one of the only schools in New York City, public or private, that had not announced some form of hybrid schedule. Multiple sources told me that if Dalton had managed to offer in-person learning in 2020, they suspected the school’s antiracism efforts wouldn’t have become the target of disgruntled parents. “A lot of this stems from parents not getting in-person schooling,” one Black faculty member at a different private school told me. “[The thought-starter document from Black teachers] wasn’t a real ultimatum…it was a document saying if you really want to make a real difference, here are the things that could make a difference. It began recirculating in October or November in response to a protest letter sent by parents because Dalton was the only school not offering some sort of hybrid learning, and Dalton teachers still didn’t want to go back. In my opinion it’s a failure of leadership to not mediate the demands of the different constituencies.”

Unlike those at Dalton, Nightingale parents have yet to go public. But some have begun to grumble about what they consider to be the leftward slant of the curriculum. Earlier this year, the school held an information session for Nightingale’s Parent Council Board on the Pollyanna DEI curriculum, which is aimed in part at correcting narratives that support white supremacy, and which Nightingale, Brearley, and Dalton have all adopted. (Pollyanna Inc., a national nonprofit advocating for diversity initiatives in schools, was founded by a Dalton alum who served as a school trustee for 10 years.) One upper school student of color at Nightingale said she heard that some parents were offended by the meeting. “I guess their attitude is, I’m paying all this money to go to this school, and they are making me feel bad about internalized racism,” she said. “There were definitely issues with people on [the parent board] who felt that they didn’t want their money going towards this kind of thing.”

A parent of a Nightingale upper school student told me that parents at both of his childrens’ schools are worried the diversity push has gone too far, but “it’s all very hush-hush, among friends.”

“There has been a lot of concern among parents because the messaging has been very negative,” this person told me. “There’s an underlying ethos of ‘white people are bad,’ and people don’t necessarily like that it’s challenging our entire history, but it’s a slippery slope because who’s to say what’s okay today won’t be construed as evil tomorrow? In the future we may all be considered evil for eating meat. Who knows? They are starting to learn that capitalism is evil, but then who’s going to pay the tuition?”

“There are white parents who are like, are you trying to teach my child she’s racist? That’s their lead-in,” said a Nightingale parent of color. “My understanding is that many of these people are voices with a lot of money, and they are threatening to withdraw money.”

Other parents’ disapproval has been overt. In 2017, billionaire hedge funder John Paulson wrote a letter to Spence in which he complained of “an anti-white indoctrination that permeates many parts of the Spence curriculum,” a topic he has reportedly harped on for years. Two students of color in the same grade as Paulson’s daughter said she withdrew from Spence shortly after the letter was sent. “Some of her friends said that her parents took her out because they didn’t like some of the stuff she was learning,” T, one of the students, told me. “I think that it has to do with how the administration handles things. They try to satisfy both students and parents, and it creates a lot of confusion.” (Paulson did not respond to a request for comment.)

The next year, the parents of a white sophomore who was also in T’s class sued for defamation after the head of the upper school forced their daughter to apologize for making a post on her private Instagram account that referenced dressing up as “slaves, indigenous people, and white settlers.” In their lawsuit, Michelle and Adam Parker faulted Spence’s diversity curriculum, which they claimed “has led its administrators to view speech and actions through a ‘racialized’ lens and created a call-out culture and victimhood mentality among many students.” Spence, they said, allowed two students of color to “weaponize” their daughter’s post, “knowing that at Spence, a claim of victimhood from a student of color is a form of power.” The school “cared only about appearing to take swift and decisive action to quash a specter of racism—even after knowing the incident was decidedly not what they originally understood it to be,” the lawsuit alleged. The Spence faculty members involved in disciplining Parker have since said they did not read her post before compelling her to apologize for it.

One of the Parkers’ attorneys, Tom Clare, confirmed that both Parker daughters “began matriculating at another top NYC private school” in the fall of 2019. “All the Parkers ever wanted was for Spence to correct the misinformation swirling in the community about [their daughter’s] social media post as a result of the false statements administrators made during a school assembly,” Clare said. “When it became clear that Spence administrators were unwilling to do so, even as those administrators acknowledged their own role in spreading misinformation, the Parkers lost trust in the school’s leadership.” Their suit was decided in Spence’s favor in late October of last year; Clare said the Parkers appealed the decision in November.

Perhaps the best-known instance of parental dissent has come from Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News anchor and NBC News host, who said in a November episode of her podcast that after years of “resisting,” she and her family were moving out of New York City altogether. The final straw, she said, was when her childrens’ private schools attempted to “appease” the student groups behind the blackat Instagram accounts last summer. “All these schools rushed to send out self-flagellating letters about how racist they are,” she said. “Both the schools sent almost identical letters: ‘We’re terrible. The U.S. is terrible. We’re so sorry. We’re going to do everything within our power to make it up to everybody.’ And I think a lot of us were like, ‘What specifically did you do?’…It’s out of control on so many levels. The schools have always been far-left,which doesn’t align with my own ideology, but I didn’t care…most of my friends are liberals…but they’ve gone around the bend.”

There have been many moments during the pandemic when L, a senior of color who has attended Dalton since kindergarten, said they’ve been stunned by the gulf between their white, wealthy classmates, whose parents complain about the lack of in-person school from their vacation homes, and their friends of color, whose text chains are about wanting teachers to be more flexible with deadlines in the midst of a pandemic. But they don’t believe the “Loving Concern @ Dalton” letter represents how the majority of the senior class feels. “The white students, for the most part, want to be better. There are microaggressions, but most of them get it,” they said. “The tension is more between the rich white parents and students of color. If it’s a change that white parents can get behind and support, and if it’s something easy for the school to do, they’ll do it. But if it’s something that really challenges the rich white families and their vision for education at Dalton, then it’s slow.”

L remembers instances when the administration punished students for racism. A student two years ahead of her left the school after using the N-word on Snapchat while dressed as a Klan member, she recalled. She also recalled a separate incident in which a white student was suspended for calling a Black student the N-word. But according to multiple @blackatdalton posts, the administration has been lax about racist incidents perpetrated by white students in the past, especially when powerful Dalton families are involved. (A Dalton spokesperson said the school does not comment publicly on matters of internal discipline, but shared a policy in the school’s internal handbook that prohibits the use of the N-word and other identity-based slurs by every member of the K–12 community.)

“Here’s the problem with antiracism: It’s not about one thing,” said Dena Simmons, a DEI educator and private school graduate who has worked with various independent school faculties. “You can throw all the money at the DEI budget. You can get a chief diversity officer, but what happens after that? Who do they answer to? The same board of trustees, the same school board. You hire this chief diversity officer but give them no power to do anything because it makes parents feel uncomfortable. You get parents who protest. They get in partnership with other parents and they kind of start a movement. ‘Several of us are uncomfortable with our children learning about lynchings in middle school,’” she said by way of example. “At the end of the day, the parents are consumers. And the loudest ones are the ones with the most money.”

At first, the teachers’ thought-starter document didn’t make waves. Then it was written up in the New York Post, where Dalton officials were quoted as saying, “the school does not support all the language or actions [the document] contains.” About a month later, the “Loving Concern” letter dropped, and neither Best nor the school denounced it forcefully, infuriating Black teachers and students. Zuri Washington, a Black 2009 alum who remains active in her old school’s antiracism work, described Best’s response as “very, ‘there are good people on both sides.’”

Best defended Dalton’s DEI work in an email to Vanity Fair, citing the school’s “firm commitment to be an anti-racist institution.” “There already have been real achievements, and we are holding ourselves accountable to the entire Dalton community with regular updates on progress,” he wrote. “Our work, however, is only beginning. In the coming weeks and months we will continue to discuss and take meaningful action towards these objectives.” A Dalton spokesperson added that the teachers’ thought-starter document was “never formally presented to school administration, never ratified by the full faculty and staff, and never considered by the administration.”

For many Black alums, Dalton’s approach to the teachers’ thought-starter document and the “Loving Concern” letter was the latest in a series of betrayals that have been amplified since Black Lives Matter demonstrations swept the nation. “When all the protests first happened, I was enraged that the school hadn’t given an official position,” Washington said. “When they did, [the response] was fairly tepid and not what the community was looking for.”

Dalton’s second, and by far more inexplicable stumble, according to multiple sources, was inviting Camille Rich, a Black university professor who has defended Rachel Dolezal, to moderate a July Zoom meeting for alumni of color. They had wanted a place to speak freely, process their trauma, and name those who had harmed them. Instead, they got a meeting that W characterized as contentious and overly policed. Multiple Black Daltonians who attended recalled that Rich urged alums to be sympathetic to predominantly white institutions like Dalton. “The response was vitriolic,” Washington said. “There was one person in particular on the call who completely reamed her out. They said, ‘Shut up. You have spoken enough. It is not okay for you to tell me that I have to put my pain in a particular package for it to be digestible.’”

Rich recalled the event with more nuance. “The forum I was invited to participate in was designed by Dalton, and bears no resemblance to the long-term DEI work I do with other schools,” she wrote in an email. “I was a late addition, and the school was not prepared for the full emotional power of what their alumni needed to share. If this person you interviewed perceived me to be asking them to be sympathetic to Dalton, that is a mistake. What I did ask for was patience as the school figured out what vehicle and space was the best one to give the alumni the voice they needed. I have a great deal of empathy for the alumni that participated in the Dalton event. They did not feel heard. They did not want me there. They understandably wanted to hear from Dalton. That is what reconciliation is about. Holding those who have harmed you to account.”

“That meeting was Terrible,” reads a July 24 @blackatdalton post. “Why were so many white people on the call? Many of whom have inflicted racist trauma on Black folks. How dare you police our tone and messages?”

Another meeting, a town hall held at the end of the 2020 school year, was described by A, a Black attendee, as “cathartic.” Only 45 minutes had been earmarked for the town hall, A said, but students of color asked for more time, and spoke for nearly three hours about the ways in which they’d been made to feel like guests at the school where they were meant to belong. They described teachers’ use of the N-word when reading from certain texts, and a host of other microaggressions.

The meeting, A said, was the first and only forum she remembers since the launch of @blackatdalton where students were allowed to name white teachers accused of racism. Best’s attendance was spotty. “One [student] kept writing in the chat, where is Mr. Best? Why isn’t he here? After a period, he came back on the call. But he was definitely gone for a substantial period of time.” (A Dalton spokesperson attributed Best’s absence for portions of the event “to a scheduling overlap” with a parent meeting to discuss DEI. “Mr. Best participated in both meetings as scheduled, splitting his time to ensure he could meaningfully contribute as much as possible,” the spokesperson wrote.)

A felt gratified that students of color had been given space to process their trauma, but did not expect the conversation to amount to much. “So many of us just wanted to get in a room with leadership and be able to speak freely,” they said. “For me, all of that came together in that moment. The conversation was finally happening. Of course, then we regressed. Summer break happened and it was, ‘Okay, we’re done with that. Let’s put that on hold.’ We were going somewhere, but as usual, Dalton got in its own way in trying to control the rhetoric. That was extremely destructive.”

Students of color say they were also let down by the administration’s handling of the blowback to its DEI work. Dalton’s English department announced a policy banning teachers from verbalizing the N-word in June, but L, a senior of color, told me that students were disappointed by a Zoom meeting with the department in which some of the teachers who’d been singled out for racism in @blackatdalton posts were silent. At least one teacher wrote an apology letter, L said, adding that although the letter didn’t appear to have been compelled, the teacher’s contrition also didn’t seem genuine. “It started out well but was clearly very defensive towards the end, and we were unclear whether it was our teacher having a learning experience or defending her decision to say it,” they said. “It was a lot of, ‘I was unaware, and now that I am aware of it, I’m not going to do it again.’” (When asked whether any changes to faculty have been made in response to the @blackatdalton posts, a Dalton spokesperson said, “We continue to strongly support our outstanding faculty and staff in every way possible.”)

L has noticed that individual teachers or departments have made some changes to their courses this year. She characterized a unit in health class about white supremacy’s impact on health care as “the most I’ve ever learned about a topic ever.” But by and large, L said, there doesn’t seem to have been a top-down revamp of the high school curriculum. “The goalposts shift a lot, so it’s hard to see how much of it is ‘this is a discussion we are having’ versus ‘this is a change we’ve made.’ I feel like we have had more diverse assembly speakers and the representations we are getting in English and history texts are more nuanced, but I don’t know much beyond that,” L told me. “If it’s a change that white parents can get behind, it’ll happen. But if it jeopardizes the status of white students even a little, I’m less optimistic. I’ve had my own meetings with school administrators about bullying and harassment and the response has always been, ‘Our hands are tied.’ I think there would have to be a lot of public pressure for things to change. There was public pressure for a while over the summer, but now I think it’s gone.”

“The school’s hands are never tied, but the outcome is not always apparent to the community as the School maintains the privacy of all involved,” Dalton’s spokesperson said. “As stated in our official school policy, Dalton requires all members of the community to report all incidents that rise to the level of harassment/bullying, regardless of who the offender may be. The School takes prompt, reasonable action to prevent, investigate, and remedy harassment/bullying.”

Though Washington remains active in the antiracism campaign at the school, in January she resigned from a DEI committee of Dalton’s alumni council, along with a handful of other Daltonians of color who had joined because they thought their old school was poised for real change. Initially, the 15 BIPOC graduates Dalton tapped to serve on the committee were told they would be part of the dialogue surrounding curriculum reform. Then, they were informed that their work would be limited to fundraising, events, and mentorship, Washington told me. It felt to Washington as though they were being “relegated to fundraising.” Washington says she ultimately resigned from the committee because she refused to sign a confidentiality agreement presented to members.

“There were a lot of people who joined in good faith and thought Dalton would utilize our talents, but they haven’t wanted to engage with us in a nonsuperficial way. We felt it was a bait and switch,” Washington said. “We couldn’t even get to the point of talking about the changes we wanted to make. If you want to really do antiracism work, a confidentiality agreement is the antithesis of that.” (When asked to confirm Washington’s account, the Dalton spokesperson wrote: “Dalton’s long standing DEI work—of which anti-racism is a component, and is foundational to educational excellence—continues, and the administration has provided regular updates on this work to the school community.”)

In January, Washington told me about the last time she had a phone call with Best and asked him what he was going to do about what everyone was calling a leadership problem. “He didn’t haven’t an answer,” she said. On February 26, Dalton’s DEI director resigned after about two years in his role. Though Washington dismissed rumors that he was “Jim Best’s fall guy,” she also said she was not surprised. “He left of his own volition, but I knew he was going to leave by the end of the year,” she said. “DEI directors usually suffer from extreme burnout and/or lack of institutional support.”

In March, Washington and a small group of like-minded alums from “across the color spectrum” began circulating a defense of Dalton’s antiracism reforms. They wanted to publicly support the summer proposal drafted by Dalton teachers, and to demonstrate that there is more consensus than discord. “We commend the direction Dalton is going in, but we also firmly and lovingly push them to aim higher, to be more transparent and communicative in their efforts and to lean on its constituency members who have put forward and continue to offer creative solutions,” it reads. “The legacy upon which we stand is not only open to these ideas, it calls for them.”

Washington told me that Best sent her an email reply. “He wants to meet with me as well as our leadership team,” she said. I asked if she was happy with this response. “Happiness? No, because that’s hard to quantify,” she said. “I want something tangible and quantifiable. I think this is about resetting the playing field.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misspelled the last name of educator Dena Simmons. It is Simmons, not Simpson. 

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story erroneously stated that the “Loving Concern @ Dalton” letter did not initially make waves in the Dalton community. In fact, it was teachers’ thought-starter document that did not initially make waves. 

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