this happened to liberal moms and a colombian immigrant in boston, but if any of you have kids in seattle or oakland, you've probably noticed the same thing,

Mothers who challenged new policies in their kids’ schools were accused of being racists and right-wingers. Now even many teachers say some changes went too far.
By Carey Goldberg
January 30, 2025,

The three mothers had always voted Democrat. One had a Bernie Sanders mug on her desk. They worked in helping fields — international aid, mental health, yoga instruction. They volunteered at their children’s schools.
They fit right in to suburban Newton, with its liberal leanings and vaunted public education.
At least, they did until 2022, when what they saw in the schools prompted them to start questioning district policies on equity and academics. Out loud.
“At first we were just trying to understand the drastic changes that took place while no one was in school during COVID,” says one of the mothers, Vanessa Calagna. “It was like we were trying to put a puzzle together. And then we were trying to ring the alarm.”
Those changes involved a heightened emphasis on racial equity and antiracism, including a district commitment to “dismantle structures rooted in racism” and seek “more equitable outcomes for all students.”

In Newton, we tried an experiment in educational equity. It has failed.
Newton’s high schools are trying a teaching method to help lower-achieving students. The results so far are unclear.
Among the moves made in the interest of equity was an initiative by Newton’s two celebrated high schools to combine more students into “multilevel” classes. Rather than students being divided into separate classes by level, students at varying levels would learn together — even in math, science, and languages. The goal: to break the persistent pattern that white and Asian students predominated in “honors” classes while Black and Hispanic students tended to be clustered in less-challenging “college-prep” classes.
The three mothers compared notes and found that many of their concerns dovetailed.
They wanted to know whether the multilevel classes and other new policies — such as denying advanced math students the chance to skip ahead a year — hurt students academically. They also worried that the schools’ newer approaches to race and other identities emphasized differences rather than commonalities. And that equity was being defined as “equal outcomes” rather than fairness.
Many parents had similar concerns. When School Committee member Paul Levy was campaigning in 2021, he spoke to more than a thousand parents and estimated that about 80% of them raised such issues.
“Most painful to hear,” he says, “was that parents were saying, ‘I don’t dare talk about this, because if I do, I’ll be called a racist.’”

‘Ideology superseding student needs’

But Calagna and her fellow activists did talk about it, along with a growing number of allies — most, similarly, longtime Democrats and liberals. They made comments during School Committee meetings and wrote letters.
Among them was Colombian immigrant Jany Finkielsztein, a longtime educator focused on disadvantaged students, who warned that the district was trying to close gaps the wrong ways.
She says the move to multilevel classes was “ideology superseding student needs.” She was particularly concerned that the changes did not address the disparities among younger students and could hold back advanced students in the upper grades.
In late 2022, the mothers and their allies launched a petition to create an advisory panel that would give parents more voice on academic issues, modeled after a similar Dedham committee that had been well received there. The proposal drew more than 300 signatures.
It also drew fierce opposition. The mothers and their allies found themselves portrayed online and in public as dog-whistling bigots doing the bidding of right-wing national groups.
Social media comments painted their side as “racism cloaked as academic excellence” and “right-wing activism cloaked as parental concern.”
PTO newsletters opposed them, as did the teachers’ union and the robust local group Families Organizing for Racial Justice, which claimed in an email that some petitioners “challenge the need for any activities related to micro-aggressions, inclusion, respect or belonging.”
Calagna says that in the fraught hours before a School Committee vote on the petition in March 2023, a supporter told her that a local politician predicted the meeting “is going to be a bloodbath and they will have to move out of Newton.”
The mothers requested a police presence.
When the School Committee voted, zero of nine voting members supported the petition. One member called it “DOA,” dead on arrival.
At that four-hour-plus meeting, one speaker — a professor — compared the petition’s backers to the white women who helped perpetuate segregation and white supremacy.
Several of the speakers defended programs to support students of color even though the mothers’ petition did not challenge them. (The petitioners had been incorrectly conflated by some with Parents Defending Education, a national group that has in fact raised legal challenges to such programs.)
Speaker after speaker declared that academic excellence and racial equity are not contradictory at all, and in fact complement each other.

Fast forward to 2025, though, and many Newton teachers are openly rebelling against the multilevel classes that school leaders promoted as advancing equity.
Those teachers report that the classes do not tend to work well for anyone — not for teachers, not for students who need more support, not for those who need more challenge. Many parents concur.
“I’ve heard about multilevel classes from many, many parents over the last three years, and the feedback has been consistently negative,” School Committee member Rajeev Parlikar said at a November meeting. “I actually have not heard from a single parent who thought their child benefited from being in a multilevel class.”

‘The third rail until, all of a sudden, now’

Calagna and her closest allies have largely fallen silent since their public drubbing. But other parents are speaking up now, circulating a new petition that asks for the multilevel classes to be rolled back urgently in math and science. It has attracted more than 400 signatures.
As Calagna and friends watch from the sidelines, they cannot help noting that if their group had not been so vilified and dismissed two years ago, this conversation and course correction could have happened sooner.
“We saw something not working, and it has been proven,” Calagna says. But they had been unable to control the narrative, unable to combat labels like “racist” and “right-winger” so socially unacceptable in a place like Newton that their actual issues were little heard. Calagna found she could not convince even friends and acquaintances that no conservative conspiracy was at work.
“We were really, truly three innocent moms just trying to get conversations going,” she says. The three used to joke that if they had indeed been funded by right-wing groups, “maybe we would have done a better job.”
Even now, the two mothers who worked most closely with Calagna said they’d speak with me only if I kept their names out of this story. They remain concerned about potential social blowback, even in this time of reflection in some progressive circles about whether “cancel culture” and DEI overreach helped reelect President Trump.
Calagna still winces at how she was publicly pilloried in her own community. But she agreed to be quoted because “we have to be able to stand up and talk to our neighbors about what’s on our minds, regardless of whether it’s socially acceptable.” If others disagree to the point they falsely accuse her, she says, well, she’s made her peace with that.
Personal note: I first heard about the three Newton mothers last year when some parents in my town, neighboring Brookline, were fighting an equity-related plan to eliminate honors English classes in ninth grade. I supported those Brookline parents, mainly because I remembered being a teenaged bookworm who benefited greatly from honors English.
Some of the Brookline parents saw an important lesson in what their Newton counterparts went through: that any broad challenge to policies related to diversity, equity, and inclusion could elicit major pushback and accusations of reactionary racism.
So they kept the focus very narrow: ninth-grade English. Something worked. The Brookline School Committee retained the honors option, at least for now.
As the Newton mothers tell their story, though, they were pulled inexorably into broader issues of equity whether or not it was tactically wise, because so many of the changes that troubled them originated in the district’s sweeping new DEI orientation.
When they or other parents questioned new policies that had mysteriously appeared, they would often be referred to the district’s “statement of values and commitment to racial equity,” which envisioned more equitable outcomes and tireless work toward “an antiracist future.”
“And that was untouchable,” Calagna says. “That was the third rail until, all of a sudden, now.”

‘Fear, shame, and guilt’

Calagna, a longtime mental health coach and counselor who specializes in adolescent girls, began questioning how the schools were teaching about identity and social justice because she was concerned about what it was doing to teen mental health.
At a time of rampant high anxiety and low social connection for teens, she found that students she worked with, instead of coming together over commonalities, often had the sense that they needed to be protected from anyone whose identity was different from theirs.
“Our kids internalize helplessness, fear, shame, and guilt from the learning initiatives designed to increase DEI,” she concluded. “This is not how we make social change and progress.”
For another member of the trio, the galvanizing factor was a math whiz child who was not allowed to accelerate and ended up learning the advanced material independently out of a textbook.
The third mother was disturbed by what struck her as a hyperfocus on identity, both in class and out, and a simplistic “oppressor vs. oppressed” worldview. When she asked for more varied perspectives, she was told the curriculum conformed to the district’s statement of values.
As the mothers sought to understand what was happening in the schools and how to counteract it, they explored a connection with a new national group called the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.
They held two home events with its speakers and used some of its language for a proposed alternative to the district values statement that would emphasize “common humanity.”
That connection fueled the accusations that the mothers were right-wing pawns. FAIR has been called “anti-woke,” and some call the mothers’ camp “anti-DEI.”
But “anti-woke” and “anti-DEI” are not the same as “right-wing.” FAIR, a nonpartisan nonprofit that opposes identity politics and supports “diversity without division,” certainly disagrees with some orthodox progressive positions on fraught issues, including transgender topics. But its positions, including its challenges of race-based policies, tend to have broad support in the American center, and its members span the political spectrum.
As for Calagna’s trio, they identify as people with “traditional liberal values.” Calagna herself has never filled in a Republican circle on a ballot, she says.

What happens now

Even with many teachers and parents clamoring to roll back the multilevel classes by next fall, the fix is not simple and cannot happen so quickly, Newton superintendent of schools Anna Nolin said in an interview.
When she took office in mid-2023, she found that the prestigious district lacked basic infrastructure that is standard elsewhere, including systems for curriculum development and student assessments. Also absent: an agreed-upon system for the district to track the effects of the multilevel classes on student achievement.
Work is underway now to define levels and determine which level a student belongs in, beginning with math, she said, “but you can’t fix the curriculum overnight.”
Also underway, Nolin said, are efforts to rebuild parents’ trust in the Newton schools, including establishing a new Office of Family Engagement. “I want you to know exactly what we’re doing,” she said.
The district has also just contracted with an online tutoring company whose services will be free to all students, aiming to counter the disparities that arise between families that can afford out-of-school instruction and those that can’t.
The logo for Newton schools that says "equity and excellence" is going away.

Post-pandemic, Nolin said, “parent attitudes toward the schools changed, and there was a skepticism about how effective our methods were. For whatever reason, they did not feel heard by the school system, and that is the cocktail that brought us this schism between ‘equity’ and ‘excellence’ groups.”
In fact, the district’s existing tagline — “Equity & Excellence” — has become “divisive,” Nolin said.
It will soon be changed to “Where All Children Thrive.”