Pollyanna

The Pollyanna curriculum around critical race theory has become controversial since it began to spread rapidly among private schools following the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, with many parent groups protesting what is described as an abandoning of traditional educational programming to embrace “an obsessive focus on race and identity.” ²

Background

Pollyanna was founded at first as a part-time project in 2015 by Casper Caldarola, a mother and trustee at The Dalton School, and the then-communications director at private boys’ school Allen-Stevenson, both on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The organization has since grown to become the largest diversity, equity, and inclusion educational consultancy in Manhattan and had contracted with schools across the nation including in Massachusetts, San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles. ³

While the organization is a nonprofit, it essentially functions as a consulting firm, charging high consulting fees to its clients. ⁴ Rates charged by Pollyanna to schools for its consulting services include $1,750 per hour to incorporate “racial literacy content”³ into classrooms, $6,000 for a half-day training for administrators, and $21,000 plus travel expenses for a three-day curriculum review for schools considering a complete overhaul of administrative and classroom procedures. ³

Practices

Pollyanna’s curriculum and consulting practices encompass a variety of methods including trainings, meetings, surveys, and parent-teacher workshops. The organization teaches schools to target specific communications based on race, such as providing an email update tailored to “our white-identified community members,” and holding a “white parents workshop.” ³

Pollyanna’s K-12 curriculum is designed to implement racial topics around all subjects including history, language arts, geography, science, and sociology. The programming begins for 5 and 6-year-olds in kindergarten matching their skin to provided pantone color charts, with Pollyanna stating that recognizing and categorizing skin color is a “foundational skill.” ³ Further required teachings under the Pollyanna curriculum include eighth graders launching “social justice action plans”³ where students devise public pressure campaigns to “overturn white privilege.” ³

Criticism

Criticism has been levied against both Pollyanna’s staff and curriculum. Media coverage has pointed out that it is not clear that anyone at the organization has substantive credentials in areas such as curricular design or childhood development. Casper Caldarola, the organization’s head and founder, does not have formal training in such areas. The organization’s circular specialist additionally claimed to have a graduate certificate in racial literacy from the University of Pennsylvania, while the university had no record of her attending and offered no such certificate. ²

In January 2021, a group of alumni and parents at The Dalton School, which was closely tied to Pollyanna, released an anonymous public letter stating that the school was abandoning real education in favor of an “obsessive” focus on race in every class. ² The letter blamed Pollyanna’s work with the school for implementing lesson plans that included incidents such as a Jewish student being forced act as a “racist cop” ² in science class, or the art class on “decentering whiteness.” ² The release of the letter drew media attention to what previously had been internal feuding in the school and was shown as example of parental opposition to critical race theory teachings. ⁵