The Kindergarten Wars

by Alan Eisenstock

  Mantle answers these questions and a few more with patience and humor, putting a lid on his usual theatricality. Then, promising there will be more time for further questions at their interviews, he excuses himself. Katie is impressed. She finds him pleasant and intelligent, says so to her two new friends. Moments later, Chloe comes in. Katie leaps to her feet. “Oh my God. Thank you. You saved my life. You saved my kid’s life.”

  “She was just nervous. It’s hard for a lot of kids. They have to adjust to this totally new setting.”

  “Yeah, but you were incredible. What can I do for you?”

  Chloe laughs. “Tell Edgar to give me a raise.” She turns to the room. “I actually came in to tell you that the kids are now outside playing. They were all great.”

  Katie’s new friends wait as Katie gathers up her knitting. They walk slowly down the narrow paved path toward the playground, wishing each other good luck and peeling off as soon as they get a glimpse of their kids at play. Katie spots Alex sitting at a snack table with her partner. They are drinking juice boxes and sharing a bag of Goldfish crackers. Katie looks around, counts ten visiting kids with ten kids from Evergreen.

  This is a nice way to do it, she thinks.

  She starts toward Alex. Alex giggles, says something, and her partner laughs. Katie bends down, smiles at her daughter.

  “Hey, kiddo, how you doing?”

  A smile, then a sideways glance at her partner. “Good.”

  “We can go now if you want,” Katie says. “Or if you want to stay a little longer, you can. It’s up to you.”

  Alex looks at her new friend, smiles again. “I want to stay for ten more minutes.”

  “You got it.”

  “I was surprised,” Katie admits later. “I expected that she was going to tell me that she was ready to go back to her school because she loves it so much. I was thrilled that she wanted to stay longer. They give you the option to stay another hour. She went to the max. Had a great time.”

  In the car on the way home, Katie asks Alex if she likes Evergreen School. “Um-hm,” Alex says.

  “What did you like best about it?”

  Alex presses her nose against the window, thinks. “The playground,” she says. “And the kids.”

  “Cool. It’s a good school, huh?”

  “Um-hm.”

  Well, okay. At least I have a reference point, Katie thinks as she pulls into her driveway. But man . . . a few months ago I would not have put Evergreen on the map for us. It’s perfectly fine. But it’s not Hunsford. If I don’t get in there, I don’t know what I’ll do.

  Katie’s Dream

  The next week, Katie and Miles have interviews at Warwick and Bingley, two schools they rank behind Meryton and, of course, Hunsford, which has emerged in Katie’s mind as more than her first choice; it has become her quest, her Holy Grail, as Miles puts it, “her heart’s desire.” After the interviews, Katie and Miles are prepared to eliminate both Warwick and Bingley, but for different reasons.

  Warwick reminds Miles of the public school he attended. The building is nondescript, the teachers seem exhausted, the kids listless. The interview is a chore for them as well as for the admissions director, who barely looks up from their application. Katie manages to feign a degree of enthusiasm for the school, but Miles says maybe two sentences in the entire forty-five minutes they spend imprisoned on the admissions director’s couch.

  “I just think we need choices,” Katie says, breaking the five-minute silence in the car on the way home.

  “I will send Alex to our public school before I’ll spend a dime sending her to Warwick,” Miles says.

  “I didn’t hate it that much.”

  “Hate is too strong a word. Let’s go with detest or loathe.”

  In contrast, Bingley is a marvel of concrete and glass, featuring facilities that rival many colleges and a school head who regularly publishes in respected educational journals. Although Bingley is relatively new, it has become the hottest school in the city, Trina, who has her pulse on everything, tells Katie. But it takes Katie thirty-three minutes to get there door-to-door, and coming back in midmorning traffic takes her almost an hour.

  “I can’t do that every day, twice a day,” she moans to Trina. “I have two kids. I’ll be living in my car.”

  “Great school,” Trina says.

  “Hunsford is a great school and it’s five minutes from my house.”

  “Here’s the thing,” Trina says. She pauses.

  “What? I hate when you pause. It’s never a good thing.”

  “Okay.” Another pause.

  “What?”

  “I know of four kids from our class who are already in Hunsford. Three girl sibs and one boy sib. That’s four right away. Last year they took eight kids from our school. I know of at least ten who are applying this year, six girls, including Alex. They’ve already taken three girls. They’re not gonna take nine girls from Bright Stars.”

  Now Katie pauses. “So what you’re saying is it’s not looking good.”

  “I’m saying you have to really push Gracie. She’s the director of our preschool. She has to know how much you want it.”

  “I’ve gotten this whole damn Hunsford thing stuck in my head. I’m thinking I’m getting in there and now you’re telling me I’m not.”

  “I’m telling you it’s going to be tough.”

  “I have to meet with Gracie and figure out Plan B. I need to get my head into that. What if Hunsford doesn’t happen? What is my Plan B?”

  In the dream, Katie is waiting for the mail. She is sitting on the living room couch beneath the window. Suddenly the light flickers and dims and it is night. She hears footsteps and then she is jarred by a loud thud of letters and packages landing outside her front door.

  She is standing now over the mail. She bends down and rummages through a mound of envelopes, magazines, and bills. She finally comes to the five envelopes she has been waiting for, one from each school. Two of the envelopes are thick, two are thin, and one, the one she holds in her hand, is lumpy. She opens that one first.

  Inside is a pile of vomit.

  She wakes up in a sea of sweat, her stomach taut with nausea.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Failing at Four

  The kids visit and we observe them. We’re not evaluating them, grading them, or testing them. Four-year-olds should not be tested. Period.

  —a head of a private school

  ERB

  With few exceptions, every child who applies for private school kindergarten in the United States is in some way tested. Even a school like Meryton, the rarity that never meets its applicants, relies on the oral and written evaluations of the child’s preschool. According to Elizabeth Marx, director of admissions, the Meryton philosophy is summed up with the statement “We’ve never met a four-year-old we haven’t liked.” But they have met forty-year-olds they haven’t liked. As Elizabeth Marx says, “The nursery school teachers know your child and the nursery school directors know you.”

  Almost every private school in New York City requires kindergarten candidates to take a single standardized test, commonly called the ERB. ERB stands for the Educational Records Bureau, which is a nonprofit organization that administers and interprets many different types of tests given to students from preschool through high school. The test that applicants for kindergarten take is always the latest version of what’s known as the WPPSI (Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence). The test is given in approximately fifty preschools throughout New York City and at the offices of the ERB in midtown Manhattan. The ERB test is administered by a staff of approximately forty trained examiners, most with degrees in psychology, some with PhDs. The tests are given privately, one-on-one, examiner to child. Usually the child and examiner sit at a table. The examiner asks a list of questions and records the child’s answers on an answer sheet with a range from 1 to 99, a score calculated as a result of how the child has responded to the same questions in comparison to other
children his or her age throughout the country. In addition to the numerical scores, the test includes a narrative, a running commentary in which the examiner describes the child’s behavior during the test. Parents and admissions directors find the narrative a telling part of the report, especially when a numerical score is less than desirable and needs explaining. The test itself is divided into two parts, verbal and performance. Within each of these two parts are four or five subparts that assess specific levels of development in areas such as arithmetic, vocabulary, and picture completion.

  Although Pemberley School is not located in New York City, Dana Optt sees the value of a developmentally appropriate test. “It comes down to evaluating a lot of different things. What is a child’s fine motor like with a pencil? Can she listen to a story? Can she remember something that she heard in a story? Can she discriminate visually between two or three things? The examiner will ask, ‘Pick this pencil up. Put it on the desk. Put it on the floor.’ Part of it is listening and following directions. You can readily find out who has difficulty processing language, which tells you who’s going to struggle in school because of a learning disability.

  “Here’s another example from the test, or at least a type of question,” she says. “I’ll say, ‘I’m gonna say a word and I want you to listen.’ I say baseball. ‘Now you say the word. Now say it again, but don’t say ball.’ It’s a very developmental thing. Can the kid take it in, can he listen to the direction, and can he separate the two words? That is what he’s gonna have to do in kindergarten. That’s a pre-reading skill. Here’s another example from the test. You say to the kid, ‘You need gasoline for your car to run. You need a pilot to fly a plane. What do you need to work a television?’ You hear everything from ‘You need to plug it in’ to ‘You need a little black box’ to ‘I think you need TiVo.’

  “I believe there’s merit to giving kids the ERB test because it can tell you what they’re thinking. I also believe that the stress associated with taking the test comes from the parents. In most cases, kids take the test in their own preschool, in their own environment. It’s comfortable. It’s fun. The kids like it. They really do. All their friends are taking it. Kids do talk. Even in preschool. The other thing is, after the test, the results are mailed, you read the narrative, and you can meet with the psychologists who will tell you, ‘These are the things your child is very strong in and these are the things your child needs help with.’ They cover a wide range: social interaction, social cues, and so on. Finally, it’s humane. The child takes one test, one time. You don’t have to drag your child to ten different schools to go through ten different evaluations. To me, that’s not fair.”

  The head of a prestigious private school in New York sees the ERBs as less important than parents think.

  “The ERB is a small factor in our decision-making. If the scores correspond to other factors, then it carries more weight. If the scores are out of whack compared to what we see and what the preschool says, we know that the child just had a bad day. It’s not that important to us. I’m not saying that it isn’t important at other schools. It could be. To me, it’s one more stress thing. You have to put it in perspective, realize it’s really just a snapshot. The bottom line is it’s hard to assess a four-year-old. There are certain developmental markers that you look for, then you have to really look at the family. You want to make sure that the parents buy into what the school gives them and that, above all, they are reasonable people. You’re taking a chance. Unless there are clear indicators, it is a large leap of faith.”

  MK, director of admissions at Longbourne, says, “The ERB evolved in an interesting way. From what I understand, every school in New York used to do their own thing. The kids were being evaluated left and right. Everybody at the time felt that was completely inappropriate. So there was a movement toward giving one test to every kid, and the ERB evolved. Now, that’s the way it’s supposed to be, but it doesn’t really happen that way. You’re not supposed to be testing kids when they come on their visits, but every school gives some kind of evaluation of their own to see how kids work. It’s not like they’re doing test-type things. Hopefully. But I know that some people do more stuff than others. The ERB is supposed to be the one test kids are given, period. And, yes, it is an IQ test. However, it’s not accurate to judge IQ until age seven. So if the ERB is an IQ test, it is in only a moment of time for a young child. You must take that into consideration when you’re looking at the results. As a director of admissions, I consider the ERB to be just one piece of the pie. And you really have to know how to read the thing. It’s kind of like those allergy blood tests. When it’s positive, it’s positive. But when it’s negative, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t have the allergy. It is a little bit like that. Chances are if a strength shows up on the test, it is indeed a strength. But a weakness may not be a weakness. These things shift over time. Every school in the city puts a different weight on the ERB test. I will say this, however: if you have a test with all very low scores, you may have something to worry about. Chances are the child has some kind of issue. I think the test correlates that much. It’s very unusual for a child to bomb the test and for there not to be a problem. Still, you really do have to consider every factor. For example, you might be dealing with separation issues when a child takes the test. I do think a child who’s missing her mommy is going to have a really hard time. As a result, I think your scores are less accurate.”

  MK continues, “The ERB results have a lot of parts. The first page is basically the scores, the numbers. The second page is the write-up. Parents will often turn around and say, ‘Oh, my child is wonderful. The tester said he’s so great. Everything’s perfect.’ And I want to say, ‘Have you ever heard of liability?’ The testers are afraid of being sued by some irate, insane lawyer parent. So you are never going to see much accuracy on that second page. It’s starting to get a little better. I happen to think that the testers shouldn’t be that honest. You don’t want a parent walking around thinking that his or her child is not wonderful. Unfortunately, that happens all the time. The ERB results come in and if the scores don’t hit a certain number, parents will look at their kids differently. I’ve heard of cases in which a parent’s relationship with their kid changes as a result of the ERB test. Until they took the test, they thought their kid was brilliant. Now the kid gets in the eightieth percentile and the parents think the kid is a lesser person or something. It’s terrible. That’s why the ERB examiners are so careful about what they write on that second page. They don’t want to get sued. I’m serious! The whole thing sickens me. Can you imagine your relationship with your kid changing because of what he gets on a test? You know what I really think? We shouldn’t have ERBs. We shouldn’t have SATs. We shouldn’t have any of that. I would do away with all those standardized tests. Immediately.”

  We Were Pleased

  On a murderously cold day in January, Shea Cohen sits in her Upper East Side living room sipping tea. Bundled up in a heavy sweater, she wraps both hands around her cup. Liam’s ERB results and report lie facedown on the coffee table in front of her.

  “If the ERB scores aren’t good, people freak out.” Shea blows on her tea, sips. “What you hope in that case is that the schools you’re applying to have really good rapport with your nursery school director. You do hear that certain schools have cutoff numbers. Some schools, the really academic ones, supposedly only take kids in the nineties. Then you hear that this kid scored in the eighties and got in. It’s all part of the urban myth. Mysterious. Frustrating. Annoying.”

  Shea puts her tea down on the coffee table, using the current New Yorker as a coaster.

  “I have a friend who has a son Liam’s age. He and Liam are pals. He has an older brother at Longbourne so he’s a sib. He’s already in. Done deal. My friend and I made a bet. She said, ‘I’ll bet you a dollar that Liam scores in the ninety-ninth percentile.’”

  Shea shrugs, picks up her cup. “What’s funny is the preschool do
esn’t tell you when the test is. You have no idea. One day your kid comes home with a note saying, ‘Your child had his ERB test today.’ But the kids talk. They are aware of everything. Like one day Liam came home and said, ‘My friend went to Hurst Academy today. When am I going to visit Hurst Academy?’ I said, ‘You’re not going to Hurst Academy.’”

  Shea leans forward on the couch and, in an impression of Liam, puts both hands on her hips and raises her voice slightly.

  “Well, why not?”

  “Because, Liam, there’s like a hundred schools out there. We’re not going to look at every single one. Everybody looks at different schools and we picked the ones we thought would be right for you.”

  Shea circles her hands around her cup again and comes out of her Liam impression. “Luckily he didn’t ask, ‘Why not?’ I would’ve had to make up some bullshit answer like, ‘It’s too far from our apartment.’ It’s the same thing with the ERBs.”

  Cup down. Back to Liam again.

  “When am I going in to see the lady? When am I going to go?”

  “‘Soon, Liam, I promise. You’ll go soon. Everybody’s going to get a chance.’ And when he did go, he didn’t even tell me. At least I got the note. I said, ‘You saw the lady today.’”

  “Yep.”

  “How was it?”

  “It was fun.”

  “So you had a good time?”

  “Yeah. I had a good time. A lot of those questions were very easy. There were a couple that were a little harder.”

  “I left it at that. They go into the library. They sit at a table. The tester sits there with a sheet and they go through it. So let’s see.”

  She flips over the test results and looks them over.

  “They do vocabulary. Similarities. The verbal part has four subtests and the performance part also has four subtests. You have coding. I think that’s the only test that’s timed. You have, for example, a picture of a car, a dog, and a house. Under the car is a red square, under the dog is a purple circle, and so on. Then they have the same pictures below, maybe in a different order. The kids are supposed to figure out the code. So, it’s like, okay, the house is a yellow circle, you put that over here. Almost like matching. Then there’s block design. The tester will make something out of blocks, or maybe it’s already there on a piece of paper. Say it’s a star, whatever. The kid then has to make the same design. It’s like those Mighty Mind things. It’s testing small motor and I guess the ability to perceive. I don’t know.”