“I couldn’t trust these people with my kids,” Nancy Andersen, a North Carolina mother, told me recently about her child’s school. She was speaking for herself and her family, but she’s far from alone.

In 2019, Andersen began reviewing her private Montessori school’s curriculum. What she found shocked her. Her elementary-age children were being taught that America was founded on rape and murder. Her students were instructed that the first Pilgrims were bigots filled with “hatred” and “greed.” The organizations that designed the curriculum contend that, in America, racism is “embedded in institutions and everyday life.”