January 1, 2025
The next few years for education herald changes in every area, from accreditation to curriculum transparency, school choice, DEI, college funding, and technology impact. In anticipation of these historic changes, OESIS will transform into a non-profit association, NPAIS (the National Pluralist Association of Independent Schools, npais.org), for the benefit of its network. OESIS assets from Intrepid Ed News (with its reach of 50K), our suite of PD courses, our network of schools, our development projects, including the pluralism course, our curriculum alignment tools, our research, consulting, and conference businesses will be absorbed into this new organization.
Why pluralism? Pluralism focuses on the individual in groups (plural) rather than a group, race or identity (singular) for the individual. It celebrates the diversity of individual identity without the divisiveness of DEI, it promotes understanding and co-existence over power dynamics and systems of oppression, and it draws from global and civic history that goes beyond race to all forms of human experience: the religious, ethnic, immigrant, class, caste, and others. It is also what the civil rights era before DEI was built on. That is why we need pluralism; most of it has been lost when we need it most.
What will this organization be focused on?
- A Pre-college Pathway on Purpose & Pluralism. We are developing a college equivalent course, which will be highly student inquiry-based, on pluralism and purpose-building across grade levels. We intend for the course to be validated by colleges, just like an AP or IB course, through their registrars. Each school will deliver the course by creating meaningful scheduling space across grades. The course will be assessed on cross-curricular competencies (large grain skills) with established rubrics for teachers guiding the course. Students will be able to pick from a range of competencies (such as collaboration, academic research, and communication) and conduct self-assessment. Teachers will be trained to assess the student in a role corresponding to the learner-centered model. Each student can choose his/her pathway and its guiding question(s): that driving inquiry must explore an area associated with pluralism, must provide a comparative “control” or broader context for the arguments and insights from another area of pluralism, must use content sources that are not school or teacher-prescribed but accessible also through the deep partnerships we plan to bring to the table. We call these our “content domain networks (CDN)”. These are some of the elements being planned. It’s a big idea for an education system at a turning point. We have some of the best thought leaders working on it, and your school, as a member of OESIS, can be involved.
- Accreditation for the Course. Schools and teachers need to be verified as being able to deliver this course. That includes a scheduling path, skill assessment capability, recognition on the school transcript under a skills section, and more.
- Accreditation for the School. NPAIS intends to apply for one of the new accreditation licenses the Trump administration plans to open up for college and pre-college assessment. Independent schools have typically associated with one of the large seven approved college accreditors through their ICAISA regional organizations: this new landscape will eventually render that traditional process unnecessary. Our approach will cut through the wasteful busy work, it will focus on outcomes (not inputs like hiring or outputs like strategic plans), and it will be conflict-free (unlike the cosy soft conflicts of ICAISA protocols for independent schools).
- Conferences. As recent debacles at independent school conferences have shown, running conferences is an art and requires deep curricular thought and expertise. NPAIS will continue to build on the highly acclaimed conference expertise we have developed at OESIS. OESIS is increasingly focusing its professional-oriented conferences on in-school conferences for one school at a time: they are tied to a consulting process (see 5 below). The Purpose & Pluralism conference will be our annual conference, and will be for both teachers and students eventually; it will dovetail with the course and is expected to be a significant large-scale event helping students showcase their purpose and agency, with no racial segregation and plenty of diversity. The first P&P conference will be an adult-only convention on pluralism and purpose: it is scheduled for the Fall; submissions will open on January 22nd.
- Curriculum Tools & Consulting. Schools looking to change to pluralism from DEI (multiculturalism) have a historic opportunity to align their curriculum for the future. We have built those alignment tools for the curriculum (free to individual educators). As outlined in Meaning Loss, this understanding is the first step for all communities on the path forward: tools, reading, an in-school conference, and planning constitute our process. OESIS does not consider consulting arrangements for schools whose administrations have not read Meaning Loss.
- Partnerships. Moving forward, schools will need to be much more nimble in the delivery of learning. We plan to establish partnerships (as with the Content Domain Networks above) with leading technology and other organizations whose value can be substantial for our students.
Who will this association serve?
NPAIS will serve independent, parochial, and possibly charter schools committed to pluralism. Pluralism and DEI are contra-indicated, as the last 25 years have proven. Schools with exclusionary programs (DEI) that contravene civil rights laws (like Title VI and IX) will have 12 months from joining to align with NPAIS ideals to remain in good membership standing.
Over the next year, as they join OESIS/NPAIS, the schools that have embraced DEI can understand how and when to reformulate those programs (like exclusionary racial affinity groups) and curriculum changes: this migration will replace divisive structures; schools will rebalance the wholesale changes to the canon that eliminated civil rights thinking or pluralistic texts from the western and eastern canons with recent “lived experience” texts of current minorities only. The outcome will be balanced learning structures for critical thinking, historical context, diversity, meaning, and agency rather than political activism and indoctrination. Unity, independence, pluralism and balance will drive the ethos.
We are planning a series of webinars to explain these plans fully in the new year. Use this link to register your interest. The last time we held a meeting like this nearly 5 years ago in a previous time of crisis, we had 485 principals on one Zoom, and the recording was forwarded to over 3K educators. We will break these zooms into smaller groups. If you attended that Zoom in April 2020, please add that comment in the registration box. Plan to attend if your independent school intends to join as a member school, (not a school sitting as a non-member observer waiting for the crowd).
What will it cost to join?
OESIS membership will become NPAIS membership when the organization transitions. In the meantime, membership will be per-student based and virtually the same as NAIS (10% less). Schools worrying about holding two national memberships can afford both NAIS and NPAIS/OESIS by cutting back on the tens of thousands of dollars spent on the POCC/SDLC conference.
What happens to NAIS?
The more critical question, quite honestly, is how independent schools navigate the emerging outcomes of NAIS’s leadership through DEI. Here is what is at stake:
- Politics. NAIS has put a sizeable legislative target on its member schools as federally regulatable non-profits (Sarbanes Oxley): this may well bring them under Title VI and IX jurisdiction anyway, with the likely further empowerment of the Office of Civil Rights, thereby eliminating POCC and DEI at the stroke of a pen, bringing endowment or tuition taxation, and forcing transparency in (curriculum) advertising. I warned about this in 2 articles: Next NAIS President (2022) and Strange Association Bedfellows (2024).
- Leadership. Dismantling DEI will send a chilling message to almost every community that DEI has touched in independent schools, from admissions to HR. Not dismantling DEI leaves independent schools hopelessly isolated with a cloak of moral authority that much of the nation rejects. Both scenarios deeply undermine school leadership, particularly without a realistic solution grounded in meaning and purpose. This is particularly so if the path is simply to revert to the past. Trapped as it is, NAIS must make clear what its leadership believes (is it the resistance?) and what it stands for and then commit to its programming accordingly to see who will still follow.
- Teachers. Large-scale teacher attrition of the scale independent schools have never seen before is otherwise the likely outcome for any philosophically adrift organization or group of schools. We see this on both “sides” of the DEI coin already. Joining the exodus of quietly anti-DEI highly qualified expert teachers at independent schools, who see their schools changed beyond recognition through DEI, are likely now the DEI true believers with a high level of anger and despair. These are the fruits of making schools focused on power and politics rather than curriculum thinking. How do we know? Well, we are as well connected to the teacher base at independent schools nationally as any association, and you can see that from the deep reach of our research, newsletters, and more.
We take no great solace in predicting all this (see all the articles below), even though it gave us plenty of time to plan for what comes next whilst not being tarnished by the outcomes. This all could have been avoided with a close look at history and an understanding of curriculum models. The whole saga has all the hallmarks of a sequel to the collapse of the Progressive Education Association in 1955, as the tensions between the John Dewey learner-centered camp and the George Counts social justice camps led to an eerily familiar unresolved schism. The way forward for schools must always be grounded in curriculum understanding (which it was not), as my book Meaning Loss: Reimagining DEI & Purpose explains. NAIS and many of its Trustees have repeatedly failed “to co-create the future of education” (NAIS mission), first with the embarrassing failure of the Mastery Transcript Consortium and now with the morass of DEI. What credibility remains?
A new national force in education needs to emerge, and maybe with it, a person of color will be its leader if its board desires. I have raised over $60 million in non-profit school funding. We can do more together to launch this new organization. Forward this to potential donors, Board members, partners, your parent association, trustees, Colleges, and administrators seeking a new pathway forward for education (through NPAIS, pronounced “NP-AIS” like NJ-AIS or NC-AIS).
Sanje Ratnavale
OESIS President
Click here to explore OESIS Membership
P.S. If you are looking for a PD solution to the 2nd outbreak of antisemitism at POCC/SDLC, don’t forget that OESIS has all the recordings of its highly acclaimed Allyship Against Antisemitism Conference at Dartmouth in 2024 available in a course taken by many member schools online: discounts exist for large enrollments at member schools. See our reviews; they are grounded in curricular insights.
