| The
Kindergarten Wars
Will you survive?
by Alan Eisenstock
PARENTGUIDE News August 2006
Let’s start at the end.
February 25, 2007.
The admissions letters from all ten of the private schools you’ve
applied to have arrived. All but two of the envelopes are thin. You’re
waitlisted at three schools, turned down at five and accepted at two—
schools you wouldn’t pay five cents for, schools that, if you
stretched it, were your third choice.
Congratulations! You’ve hit a home run!
Park bench and urban legend horror stories abound about great kids from
wonderful families who have gotten shut out completely. As in, zero
for ten. School officials admit that over the last three years, for
the first time ever, some people did not get in anywhere. A parent I
spoke to referred to last year as a bloodbath and called this year,
nuclear war.
Let’s assume that you’ve done all the right things: you’ve
identified your first-choice school, filled out your applications early,
written your essay thoughtfully and participated in your child’s
preschool affairs without being overbearing or annoying to the preschool
director. But when all is said and done, you realize you don’t
have more money than God, meaning that you can’t write a check
that will knock a school director’s socks off; your child did
well on his ERBs but not spectacular; and your friends are not state
senators or scions of Wall Street— they’re just like you,
gulp, normal.
How will you get in?
Realistically, chances are you won’t, at least not to your first
choice school. This means your kid is doomed to a lesser private school
or public school. And forget getting into an Ivy League college.
Be honest. That’s what’s on your mind, if not in the forefront,
in the back. You believe that where your child goes to kindergarten
affects where he gets into college. He’s 4 and it’s over.
Now what? How will you survive?
By repeating two mantras every hour, more often if needed.
Mantra #1: It’s only kindergarten.
Yes, kindergarten is the most common entry point for many of the top
private k-12 schools in the area, and graduating high school from a
top private school seems to matter when it comes to getting accepted
into an elite 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 50 students in the graduating
class, the article ranked the schools that had the highest percentage
of students admitted to those ten elite colleges. The top 30 high schools
in the survey were private schools. The one public high school that
cracked the top 30 was Hunter College High School in New York City.
The article mentioned four other private high schools with graduating
classes of less than 50, that except for class size, would have topped
the list. Adding these four, the scorecard reads 33 of 34 in favor of
private schools.
So getting into the “right” kindergarten, especially if
the school is k-12, does mean there is a connection to where your child
goes to college. And getting into a premiere college means your kid
is set for life, assured of success and happiness, right? Well, no.
Much has been written about the migration of graduating seniors from
the Ivy League and other big name colleges who have taken up residence
in their old rooms in the family house. After going through private
school since kindergarten, these highly educated young adults discover
that without the pressure of classes, homework and exams, they don’t
know what to do with themselves. This phenomenon has been aptly coined
the Boomerang Effect.
“Getting into an Ivy League college does not come with a guarantee
that your child is going to be a successful human being,” an educational
consultant said. “He gets into Harvard… great. And then
what? He’s going to come home. We are creating this whole group
of children who feel entitled but don’t have a clue how to accomplish
anything. There is a huge difference between feeling entitled and having
self-esteem. Self-esteem comes from accomplishing something on your
own. That is the key. It’s way more important to know that your
child is happy and feels successful and like a viable human being who
has an effect on the world. More important than anything else.”
Repeat: It’s only kindergarten.
Mantra #2: You’re not going to kindergarten.
[Fill in elite private school here] might be the perfect school for
you, but it may be wrong for your child. Maybe your child would flourish
in a low-key environment and would struggle in a highly academic, name
brand pressure cooker, even if you know it’s a school that puts
you on the fast track to the Ivy League. Do you really want your kid
to be miserable? Or is it really all about you?
“Most parents say they want to do what’s best for their
child,” said the head of a prestigious private school. “But
in doing what they think is best, they are in fact doing some shortsighted
things, which may make their children successful students in the very
narrow sense, but really lousy people long-term. There are studies of
the top graduates of high schools that show that these kids are crashing
and burning in college. The admissions director at Harvard wrote an
article in Independent School Magazine in which he said that the nicknames
for these kids are “Teacups” and “Crispies”
because they’re fragile and burned out. It’s getting out
of control. The parents have to slow down. They have to try to grasp
the big perspective of a lifetime of learning and growing. They are
getting so preoccupied with a kindergarten spot. There are lots of other
things that are important. Look at your kid. Consider that you’ve
got a whole universe, a life, a 4-year-old life, that is going to be
around for many years. Don’t let your own anxieties color this
experience. We don’t have the perspective yet to see that we’re
going over the top.
There has clearly been a cultural shift. Parents today participate in
their kids’ lives more than ever before. They organize and orchestrate
childhood to the point that children have more activities and commitments
than most professionals.
“I think it’s harmful for children,” the private school
director said. “What’s interesting is when you look at the
lives of really successful people, when you look at where they went
to school and how well they did, you often see a story of mediocre grades
at a less than elite school. Jack Welch went to UMass, Bill Gates and
Steve Jobs both dropped out of college. The list goes on and on. My
guess is that as kids these people were not over-managed, over-programmed
or over-packaged. They’re real people, people who tried things,
followed their passions, created dreams and weren’t driven by
grades. They have skills that often aren’t measured in schools.
There is a whole emotional quotient that schools don’t measure
in a real way. And we should. What’s happened is that success
is too narrowly defined, mostly by parents. A child’s next step
for success has become the path to ten elite universities. That’s
just wrong.”
Your child may not end up in the “right” kindergarten. But
he will undoubtedly end up in a perfectly fine kindergarten, on a path
leading to the best possible college, for him. He will survive.
Will you?
Alan Eisenstock is the author or THE KINDERGARTEN WARS: The Battle
to Get Into America’s Best Private Schools (Warner Books). He
is formerly a member of the Board of Trustees of a private independent
elementary school in Los Angeles. His other books include THE HOLY THIEF:
A Con Man’s Journey from Darkness to Light (Morrow) with Rabbi
Mark Borovitz; TEN ON SUNDAY: The Secret Life of Men (Atria) and SPORTS
TALK (Atria).
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