An elite private high school in LA has been sued by a parent who says administrators pulled off a “bait and switch” with the syllabus to push a new curriculum that was “racially divisive.”
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in an LA court, Jerome Eisenberg sued the Brentwood School for breach of contract, violation of the Unruh Civil Rights Act – which protects individuals from discrimination by California businesses – and intentional infliction of emotional distress, among other claims, according to media reports.
Eisenberg said his daughter was kicked out of the $50,000 per year school after he complained about what he alleged was “anti-Semitic” discrimination at the school following a new curriculum installed after the May 2020 death of George Floyd.
He said the school held racially segregated meetings and encouraged students to treat Jewish people as “oppressors’” and discriminated against a Jewish group of parents.
“Everything at Brentwood radically changed after the death of George Floyd,” the lawsuit stated. “‘After accepting parents’ tuition payments, Defendants Brentwood and its head of school, Michael Riera, pulled a bait-and-switch with the school’s curriculum and culture.”
Eisenberg accused the school administrators of replacing its traditional teaching with “an identity-based ideology of grievance, resentment, and racial divisiveness” and “started indoctrinating [students] into what to think, based on Brentwood’s preferred political fad of the moment.”
The classic novels “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Lord of the Flies” were dumped from his daughter’s English class and replaced by Ibram X. Kendi’s “Stamped,” which Eisenberg said included “ahistorical, racially inflammatory perspectives on this country’s history with no legitimate pedagogical purpose.”
“[The] English Department told parents that if they wanted their children to read Shakespeare or Hemingway, they should do it in their own free time,” the complaint said.
The Brentwood School responded to the lawsuit in a statement saying: “The allegations contained in the complaint are baseless, a work of whole fiction and nothing more than a desperate attempt to embarrass the school.”
Brentwood School alumni include Jonah Hill, Adam Levine and Jack Quaid, and parents of alumni include Arnold Schwarzenegger, Reese Witherspoon and Jack Nicholson.
