The $500,000 Question : Part 4

The Kindergarten Wars: The Battle to Get into America's Best Private Schools
by Alan Eisenstock

(Page 4 of 5)

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 prospective 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."

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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."

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Copyright © 2006 by Duck Island Productions, Inc.

About the Author

Alan Eisenstock is the author of Ten on Sunday: The Secret Life of Men, Sports Talk: A Journey Inside the World of Sports Talk Radio, and Inside the Meat Grinder. In a career spanning twenty-five years, he has written movies, plays, magazine articles, and television shows. He lives in California.