The Kindergarten Wars

by Alan Eisenstock

  Pastor Williams’s voice sinks into a lower register. “So far I haven’t found a private school near us for my daughter. I don’t want her to go through what Eliezer did. I’m not sure what to do.”

  Many public schools in our wealthiest suburbs and in booming cities such as Las Vegas feature facilities equal to any found in the most well-endowed private schools as well as classes that limit the number of students to a maximum of twenty. But as a former cochair of the board of trustees of a private school said, “Every school has a body and a soul. The body is the facilities, after-school programs, and so forth. The soul is the administration and staff, curriculum, and philosophy. You can be wowed by the body but I look for the soul.”

  The soul of every school is its faculty. Good teachers are rare; inspiring teachers are a gift. The best are adept communicators, innovative thinkers, and lifelong learners. They are not necessarily credentialed.

  The dean of a private school, who began as a third grade teacher, graduated college with no thought at all of becoming a teacher. “I fell into it. I didn’t know what I was going to do after college. I applied for a corporate job, didn’t get it, then figured I’d follow my boyfriend to New York and look for a job there. One day, there was a job fair at school. I went and talked to the head of a private elementary school in New York. She described a dream job: working with kids, freedom to create your own curriculum, an inspiring work environment. I was hooked. Got the job and found my calling. I think that happens to a lot of people.”

  “Actually, we are the kids we teach,” a middle school head told me. “We never want to leave school.”

  Many young college graduates, often from the Ivy League colleges, find a fit as private school teachers. Their background—as liberal arts graduates, high achievers with a passion for learning—flies against the stereotype associated with public school teachers: young people who have identified a career path in college and have graduated with a degree in education.

  “There is nothing more meaningless than an education major,” the middle school head said. “Those courses don’t prepare you for the job. It’s amazing. And there’s nothing more suspicious than someone gushing, ‘I got into teaching because I just adore kids!’ That sends me running the other way. I want passionate, motivated, creative people. It goes without saying that they like kids. Why else would you apply for a job as an elementary school teacher?”

  And what about the belief that public schools pay better than private schools?

  “It’s a myth,” a school head told me. “We may not be able to offer the long-term security that a school district can because our teachers are not in a union, but as far as salary and benefit packages go, we’re right up there. In fact, we might be pulling ahead.”

  Are private schools better than public schools?

  The answer delves into the realm of judgment, that always dicey component required when assessing a quality. Some politicians and educators would argue that No Child Left Behind attempts to remove the qualitative component from the assessment process. Many educators would vehemently disagree, saying that you can’t account for a child’s mood on a given day, and that you can’t test creativity, motivation, abstract reasoning ability, and collaboration skills, all cornerstones of progressive private school curriculums and factors that are the opposite of rote learning, which is what NCLB tests.

  There is also a short answer to the question.

  It depends on where you live and who you are.

  Acknowledging that there are always exceptions, if you are poor, and especially if you are poor and live in a city, it is not out of bounds to say that any private school would be an improvement over your neighborhood school. Pastor Sweetie Williams participated in a lawsuit to try to improve sixty public schools across California, while his son Eliezer submitted himself to conditions in school every day that bordered on inhumane. But every case is not so clear-cut.

  Eve, the daughter of a physician, lives in a wealthy suburb of a major city. She attended public school from kindergarten through twelfth grade. She received an excellent education and attends a top college.

  Stacy, also the daughter of a physician, lives seven miles away from Eve in a desirable neighborhood in the city, but one where the public schools are decrepit, overcrowded, and a war zone for rival gangs. Having no choice, Stacy attended private schools from kindergarten through twelfth grade, and attends a top college.

  In order to receive an education that approached Eve’s in quality, Stacy’s parents had to enroll her in private school. Their choices were either to pay close to $500,000 to educate her from kindergarten through twelfth grade or to move. Fortunately, Stacy’s parents had the resources to afford to live where they wanted and provide Stacy with a quality education. Pastor Williams and millions like him simply do not have that option.

  The four women I followed considered their local public schools. For each of them, this was the first step in their kindergarten application process. They came away with concerns about facilities, faculty, curriculum, class size, and safety. Only one mom, Lauren Pernice, who lives in an exclusive neighborhood, said that she would settle for public school should her son not be accepted to private school. The other three felt that getting their children into private school was nothing less than necessary.

  The second reason parents apply to private school kindergarten, the second C—the belief that getting into the “right” kindergarten will put a child on the track to an elite college—at first seemed flimsy, if not downright absurd. I asked an educational consultant if her clients actually believe that getting into certain kindergartens will get their children into the Ivy League.

  “I get calls like that every day,” she said. “Had a call today from a woman who said, ‘I want my kid to go to an Ivy League college. Where should he go to kindergarten?’ The parents both went to Yale. And of course their child is gifted. First of all, I say to parents, ‘It is your job to think that your child is gifted.’ You have to be a cheerleader. Much better than saying, ‘My child? Dumb shit.’”

  When I asked Brianna, director of admissions at the elite Hunsford School, she just shook her head.

  “The most incredible thing to me is how parents want to know if getting into our kindergarten, getting into Hunsford, will help you get into an elite college. Parents ask me that all the time. They always have. People with four-year-olds are asking this. They’re very concerned. I find it astonishing. People think that if they don’t do it right, their kid is not going to get into a name college. What is a name college? To them, it’s a narrow little range of schools that are considered to be elite. The truth is we really don’t think like that here. If you ask our teachers what we have our sights on, they will say they are trying to help form kids into fantastic people who will make a difference in the world. That means to us kind, thoughtful, caring, contributing human beings. There is a real disconnect between what educators see as necessary and what parents want. We are not basing this on air. We know what skill set causes children to become successful, and it’s not what parents think it is. It is the ability to collaborate, to be part of a team. It’s not the ability to sit and calculate all day long in a cubicle. It’s communication skills. That’s number one. The ability to look at problems and to imagine solutions that are not readily apparent. And first and foremost, it’s about having confidence as a person. Esteem. Someday somebody will come up with an EQ test, esteem quotient, and that will be the end of IQ tests and ERBs and all of it. Parents just don’t get it that kids who are pushed into those narrow little molds, kids who sometimes do brilliantly on all those tests, sometimes fail miserably in the world. It’s because they don’t know how to get along, they don’t know how to do anything but deal with their own intellectual incredibleness. They don’t know how to think.”

  Despite Brianna’s plea for parents to change their focus to their children’s development rather than on getting them into a kindergarten that can lead them to an elite college, many prospec
tive parents have college in their sights. Lauren Pernice expressed a common perspective.

  “I probably shouldn’t admit this, but when you’re waiting in the admissions office to go on your tour, you flip through the brochure to see the list of where their high school graduates went to college. It’s terrible but I’m looking for the Ivy Leagues. I am. I know we’re talking about kindergarten but you want the possibility.”

  Tony, a successful businessman, whose daughter currently attends an Ivy League university, put it even more directly: “I wanted to put her in a better position for college. I knew that the private school track would give her an edge, improve her odds, especially for an Ivy.”

  Then, anticipating the next question, he added, “If she had not gone to her private school, she would not have gotten in.”

  Tara is an independent college counselor. She guides high school seniors through the stressful college application process, editing their college essays, holding mock interviews, and helping fill out their applications. Tara charges a flat fee of $5,000 per client.

  “There is a perception that certain schools, mostly elite private schools, have a more direct path into elite colleges,” Tara said. “Everyone thinks: get your kid into the right kindergarten, which gets you into the right middle school and high school, and, bam, you’re into the Ivy League. And because kinder-garten is the main entry point there is this frenzy to get your kid in and put them on that track. It’s not true that these colleges only take kids from these schools. But they do take the top kids. The best colleges are looking for the best students. The valedictorian at Pemberley has a good chance of getting into an elite college. So does the valedictorian at Such and Such High in Fargo, North Dakota. In fact, the valedictorian at Such and Such High in Fargo, North Dakota, has a better chance of getting into Harvard than a kid from Pemberley who’s not in the top ten percent of the class. Ultimately, it’s about the caliber of student.”

  Is it? There is evidence that getting into a top college can sometimes be more about the school one attends than the student who applies. A college counselor at one of the country’s top private high schools told me that the “top ten percent of our senior class gets into colleges with an Academic Reputation Rating, according to U.S. News & World Report, in the ninety- seventh percentile, while the students in the bottom ten percent go to colleges with an Academic Reputation Rating in the ninety-second percentile.” These numbers directly contradict Tara: even the poorest students at the nation’s top private schools get into excellent colleges.

  There is no denying that there is a connection between the private school kindergarten track and getting into a top college. A report in the Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Journal, entitled “The Price of Admission” (April 2, 2004), calculated where the 2003 incoming freshman class at ten elite colleges—Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, Pomona, Princeton, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale—went to high school. Using a criterion of having at least fifty students in the graduating class, the article ranked the schools that had the highest percentage of students admitted to those ten elite colleges. Of the top thirty high schools in the survey, twenty-nine were private schools, with tuition costs averaging well over $20,000 per year. The one public high school that cracked the top thirty was Hunter College High School in New York City, an exclusive high school admitting only “gifted and talented” students. The article mentioned four other private high schools with graduating classes of fewer than fifty that except for class size would have topped the list. Adding these four, the scorecard reads thirty-three of thirty-four in favor of private schools. The article summed it up: “A number of the better-performing public schools were small, highly selective ‘magnet’ schools, meaning that students whose families live and pay taxes in the area don’t necessarily get to attend. . . . Public schools were in the distinct minority.”

  Finally, there is the third C, country club, which is a euphemism meaning that parents want to get their children into certain private school kindergartens so that they can brag about this “achievement” at their country club or its social equivalent.

  In other words, getting into the right kindergarten is all about them. It is a reflection of their excellence as people and their success as parents. Getting their child into the right kindergarten is similar to traveling in the right circle of friends, wearing the right labels, being seen at the right restaurant prior to making an appearance at the right charity event or opening night. After being turned down by Dana Optt, director of admissions at the prestigious Pemberley School, a distraught dad phoned her in a panic.

  “What am I going to do?” he said. “My wife won’t get out of bed. She says she can’t show her face at the club.”

  Dana offered the perfect solution. “Tell her to say that you withdrew your application. Say the school wasn’t for you. You want to support your public school instead. Or say I was a bitch in the interview. You can use me.”

  “That’s good,” the man said. “I’m going to do that.”

  “I tell people to do that all the time,” Dana said. “Saves face.”

  “Thank you,” the man said and hung up, satisfied, without ever uttering a word about his child, never even bothering to ask why he didn’t get in.

  All parents want their children to be happy, but as one educational consultant observed, happiness can be an emotion that they project onto their children.

  “These parents say they want their kids to be happy, which means rich, a star in their field, and marrying well. They’re wrong. That’s what will make them happy. Because that means I, the parent, am successful, as opposed to accepting who your kid is. Does that come from getting into Harvard? Maybe. But I tend to think not.”

  It appears, sadly, that getting a quality education is no longer every child’s right but a privilege reserved for the privileged. And the ranks of the privileged seem to be thinning out by the season.

  Two directors of admissions bemoaned the fact that because of siblings and legacies they had only four kindergarten openings available. One school had exactly two openings.

  “This year again we took only legacies and siblings,” another admissions director said. “We did not have one single opening for anyone from the outside.”

  “Everything is amped up more than ever,” said MK, Longbourne School’s director of admissions. “For the first time that I can remember in New York, there was not a spot for every kid who applied. Many kids did not get in anywhere. Used to be, kids had choices. Now that happens less and less. There are many more kids than there are spaces.”

  The head of one of the nation’s top private schools added, “People are applying to nine or ten schools, sometimes more, out of fear, the fear of not getting in somewhere. They want to be safe rather than sorry. That builds the anxiety until it starts to become a kind of hysteria. Think about writing ten applications, going on ten tours, having ten interviews. That takes an enormous amount of time and causes a ton of stress. It’s crazy. It’s like the parents are on a train. You go to the end of the train and there is college. Getting into this or that college is what drives things at secondary schools, which is driving the anxiety about elementary schools, which is driving the anxiety about nursery schools. The train starts at preschool and it never stops.”

  And now, bubbling below the surface of the kindergarten application process, looms a sinister factor that threatens the mental stability of prospective parents: the sum of the Three C’s. While parents vie ferociously for a kindergarten spot, they know that not any spot will do. Their children’s future is riding not just on if they get in, but where. An example in the extreme:

  In 1999, in Tokyo, Mitsuko Yamada, a thirty-five-year-old nurse, kidnapped her neighbor’s daughter from a nursery school playground, forced her into a public restroom, and strangled her with a scarf. Four days later, overcome with grief and shame, Yamada turned herself in to the police. Sobbing uncontrollably, she confessed that she had killed the c
hild out of jealousy. The child had gotten into a better kindergarten than her daughter had. The little girl’s mother had begun to brag and Yamada could no longer take it.

  The subsequent trial caused a media storm in Japan, resulting in a series of local newspaper articles about Yamada, her daily life, and her relationship with the other mothers in the school. The newspaper reported that it had received more than a thousand letters, faxes, and e-mails . . . in support of Yamada.

  To my knowledge, no one in America has actually killed to get their child into kindergarten.

  Yet.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Meet the Parents

  I know that when parents visit a school, they’re looking for a vibe. Well, so are we. If we don’t get it, we won’t accept.

  —a private school director of admissions

  Private School Expo

  In most cities, the kindergarten application season begins two weeks after it ends. While scores of parents are on edge, waiting to hear if their children will be accepted off waitlists, new armies of prospective kindergarten applicants mass at the borders of private school auditoriums and gymnasiums, ransack tables piled high with information packets and admissions brochures, and thrust themselves onto school heads and directors of admissions, attempting to create indelible impressions of themselves to combat the cold, unfamiliar names that lie merely handwritten or printed on thousands of application forms.