Then there’s “gender ideology.” Erika Sanzi, who has herself recently transitioned from Obama-era charter school advocate to parents’ rights crusader, explained from the stage, parents who might be too fearful to speak out about CRT are going to revolt when they realize that the schools are trying to turn their kids trans.
 
     What or whom specifically is carrying out all of this indoctrination? Teachers unions are to blame, naturally, along with graduate schools of education—a perennial source of political ire dating back to the early nineteenth century. (That private schools are overwhelmingly union free, and do not require the credentials dispensed by schools of education seemed to matter not at all here.) Most of all, though, it was young teachers—social justice warriors all—who bore the brunt of the ire. These self-styled revolutionaries eschew not just the classic texts but all texts, one panelist bemoaned. Older, tenured teachers—the same reliable villains who’ve been depicted as the enemy of progress throughout the modern era of education reform—are evidently now the last remaining bulwark against wokeism.
 
     For parents rebelling against leftist indoctrination in the public schools, politicians have seized on a favorite conservative cure: school choice. This, too, was a baffling refrain at the Parents United conference: private school parents have already exercised that option. Indeed, one striking plaint running through the sessions in Boston was that parents who send their children to elite private schools are uniquely powerless—victimized by the meritocracy itself. To voice their grievances is to risk not just their youngster’s spot at Groton or Deerfield Academy, but also to jeopardize the great brass ring at the end of the prep school carousel: entrée into the Ivy League.
 
     Desperate times, then, call for desperate measures. Kerry McDonald, the senior education fellow at the liberty-loving think tank, Foundation for Economic Education, proposed that instead of continuing to support “school,” parents return to the time-honored tradition of teaching their children themselves. But rather than going into despairing cultural retreat mode, in the manner of many latter-day evangelical homeschoolers, the refugees from the woke prep academies can count on the largess and thought-leading cachet of Silicon Valley. “Marc Andreessen has been talking a lot about homeschooling,” McDonald reported, citing the great market imprimatur of the Netscape founder-turned-venture-capitalist.
 
     Andrew Gutmann—aka the Brearley Dad—who became a right-wing media star after he penned an angry missive republished on Bari Weiss’s Substack newsletter announcing that he was pulling his daughter from her upscale Manhattan girls’ school, went even further. He rallied his fellow private school parents to dismantle the whole woke-infected system, “until we break this track, of these fancy preschools to these fancy independent schools, to the Harvard and Princeton and Yales, to Goldman Sachs and McKinsey.”

     Parents Unite has made a target of the institutions that accredit independent schools. If groups like the respectability-granting National Association of Independent Schools are intent on turning the nation’s elite private schools into social justice camps, goes the thinking, then why not junk NAIS for some new, less “woke,” body? But this crusade has a downside. Schools outside of the traditional accreditation process may not hold the same sway with elite universities. “If Dalton is held hostage by the accreditors,” opined a writer for The Washington Free Beacon last summer, “parents are held hostage by the meritocracy.”