Inside the Growing Underground Network of Parents Fighting ‘Anti-Racism’ in NYC Schools

Until last summer, Harvey Goldman had no idea that his 9-year-old daughter was learning about George Floyd’s death and Black Lives Matter as well as her own “white privilege” at the $43,000-per-year Heschel School in Manhattan.

Now he’s part of an underground network of parents in NYC and around the country, many of whom are left-leaning, fighting what they believe is the undue focus on race by schools as part of the new “woke” culture.

Many are reluctant to identify themselves publicly for fear of being labeled racist. But more are coming forward after Andrew Gutmann, the father of a 12-year-old girl at Manhattan’s posh Brearley School, wrote a scathing screed to administrators about their “anti-racism” obsession and went public in The Post last week.

Goldman, a businessman, was shocked by the amount of negative and inappropriate “anti-racist” dogma he said was being aimed at his fourth-grader and her classmates. But when he reached out to the school with his concerns, administrators were “arrogant and dismissive,” he told The Post.

Then he sent the school a letter.

“First and foremost, neither I, nor my child, have ‘white privilege,’ nor do we need to apologize for it,” Goldman wrote last September. “Suggesting I do is insulting. Suggesting to my 9-year-old child she does is child abuse, not education.”

In response, the school suggested Goldman take his daughter out of the school, he said. So he did. The family moved to Florida where his daughter is enrolled in a public school that he vetted beforehand to make sure critical race theory (CRT) was not part of the curriculum.

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CRT is a controversial prescription for addressing racial issues centered around the idea of “white privilege.” It originated in universities and has spread to K-12 schools — both public and private. {snip}

Though the Trump administration banned the use of federal funds for CRT training sessions for US agency workers, the Biden White House last week proposed using taxpayer money to encourage schools to incorporate it in classrooms.

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Many parents, like Goldman, and Bion Bartning, whose kids were enrolled in the $54,000-a-year Riverdale Country School, only got wind of the situation after Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin killed Floyd in police custody last May or when they overheard evidence of it during their kids’ Zoom classes.

Bartning was so upset by what he said was the divisiveness and harm done to children as a result of Riverdale’s new “orthodoxy” about race that he pulled his kids out of the school.

Last month he formed the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR) to combat CRT in schools and promote a “pro-human” agenda. More than 20,000 people have already joined, Bartning told the Post.

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The “underground” network has spread to public schools, too. {snip}

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One Riverdale parent told The Post she will only go public if she decides to take her children out of the school.

“It’s awful what’s going on there,” she said. “The fourth graders learned about astronauts and inventors — but only black ones. They no longer learn about Thomas Edison. The math curriculum is a joke; they’ve dumbed it down. No more birthday celebrations are allowed and no holidays are allowed. They did away with Columbus Day but now they celebrate the end of Ramadan and the Chinese Lunar Year.”

Podcaster Megyn Kelly pulled her sons out of posh Collegiate last November after a letter allegedly circulated accusing white people of “reveling in state-sanctioned depravity” and comparing white children to “killer cops.”

But now, two parents told The Post, Collegiate administrators are listening to families at the school upset with the ideology.

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{snip} “We are part of the silent majority — so far — who I hope can save these schools from continuing down the wrong path.”