How NAIS Took over Elite Education

The Inside Story of How America's Premier Prep Schools (combined ~$22B in annual revenue) Abandoned Merit for Ideology and Excellence for Equity

This essay originally appeared in the Chicago Contrarian. Excerpts are reprinted here with permission.

I’m writing this because 35 years ago, I got a scholarship to the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

Getting in — and the generosity that made it possible — quickly took a backseat to the more immediate challenge of surviving the place. 

Shipley terrified me. And not because of the metaphorical blue-haired zombies now roaming the halls, an undead administrative and teaching army enforcing Soviet-level conformity to an ideology where race is destiny and gender is a ChatGPT jailbreak (customizable, unstable, and banned in Florida). 

No, it scared me because it was hard. Brutally hard.

Shipley taught me how to think. How to interrogate ideas. How to write. And how to crank — whether that meant pulling all-nighters for exams or, in my professional career, spending long days and weekends building tech and data businesses that any sane person would’ve bet against. 

But today, I wouldn’t stand a chance. At least not when it comes to the financial aid that once changed my life by allowing me to attend and set my path in motion. 

According to multiple parents I interviewed this year, they believe proactive recruitment and financial aid decisions have shifted to favor demographic considerations over traditional merit-based criteria like intellectual ability or athletic achievement.

The implication, according to these families, is clear: a white, Jewish or Asian kid on the wrong side of the tracks is no longer a priority.

But this isn’t about me. Or my past. And frankly, it’s not even about Shipley.

Shipley is just a mirror, one polished by a centralized cabal of private education bureaucrats who now dictate the soul of elite schooling. These are the folks who’ve turned “diversity” into dogma, “global citizenship” into a moral imperative that skips over the nation-state and Western values (like grit, self-improvement, and merit), and, perhaps most on display as a proxy for the deeper intellectual rot, antisemitism into an extracurricular activity.

In short, Shipley — like hundreds of other once-proud prep schools known for academic rigor and character education — now offers something else entirely: political orthodoxy in progressive DEI packaging. 

All of this is enforced through administrative, faculty and student training sessions, bias reporting policies, curriculum (e.g., suggesting math and physics are racist), public shaming, restorative justice and DEI strategic plans that would make a Cultural Revolution apparatchik blush.

Even at Chicago’s St. Ignatius — a school where “Latin” once meant a dead language used for proper Mass, not a demographic checkbox with an “X” appended to the end — students are now sorted into affinity groups, according to current parents, including those for incoming freshmen who I suppose haven’t yet memorized their intersectional rosary or pledged allegiance to the Holy Trinity of race, gender, and oppression.

At the center of it all is the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), a kind of private-school Vatican that trains heads of school, indirectly accredits institutions (via “partners”), shapes curricula, and blesses a select priesthood of Head-of-School recruiters and DEI (rebranded now as “Inclusion and belonging”) consultants ready to “do the work.” 

One wonders if the NAIS conclave emits a cloud of rainbow smoke every time a student in a NAIS-affiliated school changes their gender or a new head of school passes a certain victim threshold on the spinning intersectional pinwheel of death. 

In all seriousness, NAIS is a tax-exempt nonprofit with over $60 million in assets and a WEF, AOC, and UN-approved ideological pipeline flowing straight into your child’s classroom.

I’m actually shocked it wasn’t funded by USAID. Though, give it time. If DEI is ever rebranded as “democracy building,” NAIS will be first in line for State Department grants and a seat at Davos, right between decarbonization panels and sessions on decolonizing STEM.

NAIS’s regional affiliates, such as PAIS (Pennsylvania) and ISACS (Midwest), handle enforcement. They accredit schools like Shipley and try to ensure lockstep alignment with the new orthodoxy through board and administrative training (my own family has experienced it). 

Every professional development workshop, DEI strategic plan, and hallway poster is part of a distributed but disturbingly uniform system.

And that system has one goal: to turn elite K–12 private schools into factories of ideological conformity.

If you really want to understand how this works, don’t think of NAIS as a harmless trade association. Think of it more like Iran. 

The real power doesn’t sit in the hands of the schools themselves like it used to. It’s centralized, ideological, and busy funding chaos through a sprawling network of proxies. 

Shipley? Latin? Dalton? They’re not the architects. They’re the Houthis, the Hezbollah, the campus Hamas — firing ideological rockets at what used to be liberal (classically so) prep schools, all from the safety of $50,000-a-year classrooms now stocked with cold-pressed juice and equity audits instead of cold showers, Homer, and Chaucer.

And like the proxy war in the Middle East (between Western tradition and those who seek to destroy it), the real target isn’t just tradition — it’s truth.

You want the attacks on classical liberalism, pluralism, and sanity to stop? You have to go after the source. You don’t contain the problem by selectively firing the DEI consulting firm who told your school physics and math are racist. You cut the head off the snake.

Just like Israel did – after 20 years of planning. 

Chicago as a Canary: When DEI Becomes Dogma

This is not just a Philadelphia story. In Chicago, The Latin School’s administration has declared its intention to "double down" on DEI programming despite a cascade of parent complaints and media scrutinyand a student suicide that stemmed from bullying of someone who was not in a “protected” class based on melanin or artificial hormone levels. 

As reported by Latin's student-run newspaper, The Forum, the school has committed to pushing ahead with race-based affinity groups and anti-racist pedagogy "amid a national rollback."

Antisemitism is really just the canary in the coal mine for this ideological transformation at Latin and every other NAIS franchisee. But it reveals, more clearly than almost anything else, what happens when schools abandon liberal inquiry and individual dignity for a new pseudo-moral economy built on group identity, grievance hierarchies, and performative justice.

The NAIS Pipeline

All of this is by design. 

NAIS — and its regional affiliates like PAIS and ISACS in the Midwest — trains heads of school, trustees, and DEI officers through a national web of conferences, certifications, and leadership pipelines.

In fact, the NAIS NAIS Principles of Good Practice suggest that its member organizations, in order to better “guide decisions” and “steer actions,” adopt the following protocols (emphasis added):

• “The school establishes the foundations for its commitment to equity and justice in its defining documents (mission, core value, and/or philosophy statements).”
• “The board of trustees and the head of school articulate strategic goals and objectives that promote diversity, inclusion, equity, and justice in the life of the school.”
• “The board of trustees and the head of school keep the school accountable for living its mission by periodically monitoring and assessing school culture and ongoing efforts in admission, hiring, retention, financial aid, and curriculum development.”
• “The school works deliberately to ensure that the board of trustees, administration, faculty, staff, and student body reflect the diversity that is present in the rapidly changing and increasingly diverse school-age population in our country.”
• “The head of school ensures that diversity initiatives are coordinated and led by a designated individual who is a member of one of the school leadership teams, with the training, authority, and support needed to influence key areas of policy development, decision making, budget, and management.”
• “The school uses inclusive language in all written, electronic, and oral communication. 
• “The school adopts a nondiscrimination statement applicable to the administration of all of its programs and policies, in full compliance with local, state, and federal law. That said, the school makes the law the floor — not the ceiling — for establishing itself as a diverse, inclusive, safe, and welcoming community for all students, staff, and families.”

In practice, “the floor, not the ceiling” reads less like a compliance guideline and more like a wink — permission to bend the law just enough to feel virtuous doing it.

To achieve these and other “goals” of its member schools, NAIS operates an insular jobs board where administrators and educators circulate like clergy in a closed hiring ecosystem. 

Boards are quietly nudged to use approved recruiters and DEI consultants, ensuring the system polices itself — and dissent, mission diversity, and philosophical heterodoxy are quietly but systematically filtered out.

Many trustees don’t even have children enrolled; according to parents familiar with board composition, many serve because of demographic identifiers, alumni status, social ties, or a résumé that demands one more line under “Civic Engagement.”

My own wife, who sits on the board of one of these schools (hopefully not for the above reasons!), was told in an ISACS-affiliated board training session (whose materials came from NAIS) that equity and justice should be the goals of the board, not, say, excellence and education.  

But nowhere is the ideological fervor of NAIS more visible than at its flagship equity event: the annual People of Color Conference (PoCC). 

This isn’t a quiet conference about inclusion. It’s a political boot camp disguised as a tax-exempt nonprofit, churning out ideological foot soldiers on your dime (NAIS’ roughly $20MM budget is funded by member schools themselves, conference and program fees, corporate sponsorships and preferred vendor referrals, its own closed loop job boards and selling publications and data products). 

Recent PoCC panels have included workshops on "dismantling whiteness," "objectivity as a myth," and "capitalism as oppression." One speaker at the 2024-2025 school year event, Dr. Suzanne Barakat, referred to Zionism as a "strain" of ethnocentric superiority. 

Another keynote speaker referred to Gaza as a site of genocide. Jewish students walked out. NAIS issued a vague non-apology. And the board and administrative cajoling and curriculum pipeline continue unabated.

If the Enlightenment had a mortal enemy, it would be keynoting the PoCC in a workshop titled “Decentering Reason.” And if you're wondering how Shipley manages to turn nearly $50K in annual tuition into a re-education program, here's your answer: NAIS is the radar tower, and Shipley, Latin, Parker, Lab, Groton, Andover, and hundreds of other formerly elite prep schools are flying IFR on instruments calibrated by the Ministry of NAIS Groupthink.

This isn’t just parental paranoia — it’s a growing concern shared by many across the country. As the Substack Undercover Mother notes, “NAIS is not an organization that simply is an accrediting body or resource. It has an agenda that it wants to influence and implement nationally. For example, NAIS encourages racially segregating kindergarteners! NAIS [also] gathers data on students (race, gender, etc.) in its member schools … and sells member schools ‘analysis’.”

For all of this, NAIS’ former President, Donna Orem, was paid $632,703 in 2023, the year of her retirement. Orem’s replacement, Debra P. Wilson, came from one of NAIS formal regional accrediting bodies, the Southern Association of Independent Schools (SAIS). 

The Echo Chamber at NAIS Schools 

At many NAIS schools like Shipley, this “how to think” ideology isn’t creeping anymore — it’s galloping, bareback, through the halls like it just got tenure at Columbia after tearing down October 7th hostage signs on campus and blocking Jewish students from entering classroom buildings. 

At Shipley, during Alumni Weekend this spring, parents and former students were treated to classroom shrines featuring uncritical tributes to Patrisse Cullors, the self-described Marxist co-founder of Black Lives Matter (and real estate enthusiast), and Angela Davis, a radical communist, former FBI Most Wanted fugitive, and current folk hero of the faculty lounge. 

They didn't present this as complex history; rather, they presented it as canonization, sans the incense. Strangely absent? Given the school's recent antisemitism scandals, one might expect a celebration of Jewish history or specific Holocaust remembrance programming — something grounded, sobering, and a reminder that even in 2025, antisemitism is alive and well at places like, well, Shipley. 

But alas, Shipley has apparently outsourced its historical compass to the PoCC syllabus and lost the plot somewhere between intersectionality and irony.

These figures weren’t presented as complex or controversial individuals worthy of critical debate. They were celebrated as icons — no context, no counterpoint, just canonization.

Image Source: Chicago Contrarian (inside the Shipley School, 2025, during alumni weekend)

Cullors has a long history of aligning BLM with anti-Israel and antisemitic causes. She’s championed BDS, helped shape the Movement for Black Lives platform that accused Israel of genocide, and repeatedly linked Black liberation to Palestinian nationalism. 

BLM’s regional affiliate in Chicago took October 7th as a chance to celebrate the mass murder, kidnapping, and rape of over a thousand victims in Israel with a sketch of the very same terrorists on paragliders responsible for the atrocity. 

Image Source: BLMChicago / X

Angela Davis, meanwhile, according to court records, once supplied the firearms used in a deadly courthouse shooting and continues to defend violent revolutionary tactics and antisemitic ideology.

If these are the moral exemplars Shipley is holding up for its students – without nuance or critical engagement – then the institution has learned nothing since the board acted to remove former Headmaster Michael Turner and DEI leader Rebekah Adens following earlier antisemitic incidents.

That said, the framing of Turner’s exit (see below) took considerable liberties: the school never publicly disclosed what happened in its communications to the school community. That lack of transparency — and failure to reckon with the truth — is arguably what set the stage for Shipley’s continued slide this past school year.

Progressive bullying

In the 2024-2025 school year, one Shipley parent provided what they described as specific examples of students being bullied or ostracized for expressing non-conforming views. And apparently, even talking to the author of this essay (who has chronicled how Shipley became antisemitic) is verboten by administrators and faculty.

Multiple parents reported that administrators told them “we’re not allowed to talk to you.” 

Apparently, even uttering my name in the halls now triggers fits of administrative indigestion, according to multiple parents who were told not to talk to me (and who found the request obnoxious and further proof Shipley has lost the script). 

It’s clear that equity and obfuscation and Shipley continue to go hand-in-hand — with daylight into its continued DEI push being frowned upon. Parents claim that scholarships, curriculum, fine arts/musical casting decisions, and academic support programs appear to place an emphasis on race as a criteria for selection or inclusion.

The Invisible Hand, however, remains alive and well, as parents are voting with their tuition dollars. Multiple families reported significant withdrawals following the 2024-2025 school year. However, the author has also spoken with at least one new incoming parent, as well as those who considered the school, but did not enroll their children. 

Adding further pressure to enrollment numbers, according to parents I spoke with, some families reportedly had their re-enrollment contracts rescinded, with those parents believing it was connected to their challenges of school policies.

But it’s worth remembering: Shipley isn’t the story. It’s just the progressive disco floor for the NAIS loudspeaker, blasting the latest DEI remix — “Inclusion“ and “Belonging.”

Memo to NAIS: Orwell and Huxley called. They want their dystopias back. And they’re alarmed, illustratively speaking, that you’ve added a guidance counselor and gender identity worksheet for second graders.

This essay is continued on the Chicago Contrarian.