The Kindergarten Wars

by Alan Eisenstock

  Approaching the director of admissions who has turned you down while she’s out to dinner is the last-gasp measure of desperate people. Savvy prospective parents, such as Lauren and Craig Pernice, realize that strong candidates for kindergarten are ones with representatives—agents, as it were. In the case of kindergarten admissions, the most effective agents are board members. Or so people think. An example:

  A mom told an educational consultant that she was applying to only one school.

  “Don’t you think that’s risky?” the consultant asked.

  “No. Because we know we’re in.”

  “That’s great,” the consultant said. “How do you know you’re in?”

  “Our neighbor’s on the board. He promised that he’d get us in.”

  They didn’t get in. After the family received their rejection letter, the consultant asked the admissions director of that school to define the power board members wielded in the admissions process.

  “We knew what that woman was saying. We heard that she was spreading the word that a board member would get her in. That does not happen. There’s no way I would take her. She really pissed us off.”

  Still, prospective parents seek agents in high places. DJ, head of a private school, said, “It’s gotten so insane, the stakes seem higher every year. Last year, a lovely family, kind of new to the city, didn’t understand the reality. The child was not accepted because he was too young, didn’t make the cutoff date. The grandfather, who is a retired CEO, wrote me a letter pretty much begging me to take the child. CC’d George W. Bush. Shall we chew on that for a second? If you’re copying the president of the United States over kindergarten admissions, what does that tell you about the stakes?”

  Señora Evergreen

  After Katie Miller returned from shopping at Whole Foods that day in April, she called Miles and told him that she was fried. She needed some serious R&R. She suggested they go skiing, not something she was desperate to do; it was just the first thing that came to mind. She wanted a change of scenery. She wanted to let the kids run around in the snow while she crashed in the lodge. She needed a break from the city and from her life. Surprisingly, Miles the workaholic agreed. Sliding directly into madwoman overdrive, Katie got everything together in a day. The Millers hit the slopes first thing Saturday morning.

  It was heaven. The sky was deep blue and crystal clear, not a cloud. The air was brisk and, it being so late in the season, the slopes were deserted. The kids loved the change of scenery. They had snowball fights and built a snowman. Miles and Nick constructed an elaborate snow fort while pretending to be on some guys’ campout thing.

  Alex and Katie enjoyed plenty of girl time. Alex had been up on skis before but she’d always been a little hesitant. This time she was confident and ultra-cool. They attacked the baby slope as if they were training for the Junior Olympics. Of course they fell constantly. Each time, they rolled over each other in the snow, laughing hysterically. At night they built a fire, brought in food, and watched DVDs, snuggled together in one bed. They were away for four glorious days.

  While they were gone, something changed. Katie could feel a shift. It began as soon as they checked in and it became stronger and stronger as the days went on. The shift felt permanent; Katie could feel it sticking to her as they drove home.

  The shift had to do with coming to grips with priorities. Identifying them, owning them, understanding what is truly important in life.

  “You always hear people say, ‘Life is about family, friends, and health. Everything else is in second place.’ I know that,” Katie said. “I just forgot about it until we went away. I found this other level with my family. They are my life; they are what I live for. They know it. We all know it. We don’t spend time announcing it. They just know it.

  “I now truly believe that where Alex goes to kindergarten is not the biggest deal in life. When I project thirteen years into the future, can I see Alex going from Evergreen to Princeton? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know. No one knows. But now I don’t think it matters one iota. If Alex doesn’t go to Princeton or some other elite college, does that mean she’s not going to make it in life? Is she doomed to be a failure? I seriously doubt it.

  “So much of this process was about me. I got rejected by the school of my choice. She didn’t. They don’t know her. They met her for forty-five minutes. Maybe it was a lousy forty-five minutes. Who knows?”

  In the end, Alex did get into private school. She did get chosen. “Some people didn’t get in anywhere,” Katie acknowledged. “And the more I think about Evergreen, the more I like it. In fact, if I allow myself, I start to think that maybe Evergreen is the right match for our family. Maybe it was meant to be for Alex, Nick, Miles, who’s completely fine with it, and for me. Yes, for me. Maybe it will be the right match for me.”

  Katie is trying. The day after she got back from vacation she called Connie and told her how happy she was to be a part of the Evergreen community. She told her that she wanted to be involved in any way she could. In fact, she offered to teach Spanish in their after-school program, a couple days a week. Connie loved the idea. She said she’d run it by Edgar, but she didn’t see any reason why he wouldn’t go for it.

  So Katie has begun to embrace the school. “That’s the way it has to be,” she said. “After all, Alex will be spending more waking hours there than at home. You bet I’m going to be involved. Call me Señora Evergreen.”

  Now What?

  How do you get in?

  With admissions directors either unable or unwilling to answer the question, it’s no wonder that parents feel helpless and frustrated. They want to know what to do. Even if getting in, as some parents believe, means donating a certain amount of money or being connected to the right people, what is that amount and who are those people? Maybe we can raise the money. Maybe we know somebody.

  The desperation to get in is fueled by what lurks on the flip side: not getting in. The zeitgeist has spoken. Not getting into the “right” kindergarten means the end of the road. You are washed up at five years old. Banished to public school. Kiss the Ivy League good-bye. Say hello to State University.

  It is becoming increasingly tempting to buy into this argument. Each year, college admissions offices are flooded with a record number of applications. High school seniors routinely apply to at least a dozen colleges; many apply to as many as twenty. Colleges that previously would have been considered safety schools are now only fifty-fifty possibilities.

  Our culture has changed. Our children no longer strive for prestigious professions because there no longer are any. Doctors have become “providers,” lawyers are a dime a dozen and constantly fight the sleaze factor, the technology revolution has been shipped overseas, accountants are being replaced by Quicken and QuickBooks, and writers? Please. Kids and their parents have adjusted. Prestige is defined now by where you go to college. And in order to get into certain elite schools, it certainly can matter where you go to kindergarten.

  But if the admissions process from exclusive kindergarten through elite college resembles a speeding train, as the head of one private school describes, what happens when our children decide to get off?

  A striking report in the New York Times, headlined “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood” (September 20, 2005), reveals that “many women at the nation’s most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children.” Based on interviews with nearly two hundred Ivy League students, the article reports that “about 60% of the women surveyed would opt for motherhood ahead of a full-time career,” with many saying “they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment.” Without question, motherhood ranks among the most challenging, rewarding, and revered careers, but attaining world-class-mother status does not in any way require an Ivy League education.

  Which then begs the question: does attending a premier college assure success and happiness?


  The answer, of course, is no. Much has been written lately about the migration of graduating seniors from the Ivy League and other 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 are now at a loss as to what to do with themselves. One author has called this phenomenon the Boomerang Effect.

  A Columbia graduate who sells handmade jewelry in a small high-end boutique spoke about her journey from private school kindergarten to the Ivy League.

  “My parents pushed me all the way,” she said. “I went to private school and Columbia for them. Now I’m doing what I want to do.”

  It’s easy to imagine her parents torturing themselves over what has become the $500,000 question: “Was it worth it? Did we get what we paid for? My daughter is a retail clerk, selling beads for a living. She could’ve gone to public school and community college and ended up in exactly the same place for $10,000 total.”

  An educational consultant assessed the value of being admitted to an elite college even more bluntly.

  “Just getting in means nothing,” she said. “The scary part is that parents are only focusing on how much money their kids are going to make, or what they need to attain a certain status, because they see it’s a dog-eat-dog world they’re sending their kids into. I guess that’s what it’s about. They’re certainly not thinking of what will make their child happy. That’s what they should be doing.”

  Another educational consultant said, “Getting into an Ivy League college does not come with a guarantee that your child is going to be a successful human being. He gets into Harvard . . . great. And then what? He’s going to come home. They do. And since you’ve enabled your child every step of the way, he doesn’t realize that he now has to make a living, he has to make a life. We are creating this whole group of children who feel entitled but don’t have a clue about 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. To me, that is the key thing. It’s way more important to know that your child is happy and feels successful and feels like a viable human being who has an effect on the world. More important than anything else.”

  The example of the Columbia grad selling jewelry because it’s what she really wants to do is becoming more prevalent. Our society is filled with Ivy League graduates, products of private school, who are retail clerks, struggling musicians, starving artists, part-time housepainters, occasional construction workers, and freelance SAT tutors. There is nothing wrong with graduating from college and spending time, sometimes years, finding one’s way. In fact, it’s common. But that’s not what we expected of this group, our preselected elite. These are our best and brightest, the “leaders of tomorrow,” as the head of a prestigious Manhattan private school informed the incoming kindergarten class. From the moment they entered kindergarten and their parents forked over their first $20,000-plus tuition payment (guaranteed to increase by a minimum of five percent a year for the next twelve years), these “leaders” were groomed by both the private school culture and their parents to achieve. No, to excel.

  They did not disappoint. They mortgaged large chunks of their childhoods to become classically trained youth orchestra members, superior club team athletes, and precocious young scientists. They spent their summers taking college courses on Ivy League campuses or in Europe at Oxford or the Sorbonne, or painting bridges and distributing humanitarian aid in third world countries. In the margins of their days, obliterating any leisure time, they wrote prizewinning plays, acted, danced, and sang in professional companies, and interned with renowned scientists or U.S. senators. When they applied to a menu of elite colleges from their equally elite private schools, their applications boasted not only a lofty GPA and staggeringly high SAT scores, but also a portfolio of accomplishments that would surpass professionals who spent a decade in the same pursuit.

  The downside to this achieving is what makes some of them return to their rooms. They were so preoccupied padding their résumés for college that they forgot how to dream, how to play, how to be. They are products of a system that has molded them into the sum of their test scores, grades, and extracurricular activities. They have succeeded spectacularly; they have been accepted into the college of their dreams, or of their parents’ dreams, and now they have discovered that they have no dreams left and no particular place to go. And in more and more cases, kids who have been pushed to achieve by their desperate, aggressive, yet well-meaning parents find themselves emotionally battered by sophomore year.

  “Most parents say they want to do what’s best for their child,” said DJ, the head of a 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 that appeared 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,” DJ continued. “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 four-year-old life, that is going to be around for many years. Don’t let your own anxieties color this experience. We think that so much is riding on this. We don’t have the perspective yet to see that we’re going over the top.

  “Also there has been a cultural shift. Parents today are way more involved in their kids’ lives than we ever were. Parents organize and orchestrate childhood. As a result, childhood has changed drastically. It’s becoming more adult. More professional. I think it’s harmful for children. 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 overmanaged, overprogrammed, or overpackaged. 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.”

  Perhaps getting into a prestigious private school kindergarten did help our children get into an elite college.

  Now what?

  Some will graduate and continue to achieve, evolving into who they were groomed to be, our wisest, wealthiest, and most prominent citizens, our adult elite.

  Others, anointed at five, are burned out at nineteen.

  Or depressed and medicated.

  Or lost.

  Casualties of what began as the kindergarten wars.

  Acknowledgments

  The Kindergarten Wars exists because of immeasurable acts of kindness from many parents, educators, admissions directors, and school heads who agreed to speak to me only if I promised them anonymity. While I cannot mention your names, please know that I am deeply grateful to all of you. Without your participation I could not have written this book.

  Thanks to Wendy Felson, Lois Baskin, Naomi Press, Mel Foster, Josh and Stephanie Wilson, Randy Feldman, Nancy Lieberman, Sara Fisher, Robin Aranoff, Betsy Brown Braun, Lana Ayeroff Brody, Victoria Goldman, Amanda Uhry, Emily Glickman, Diane Golden, Hugh Gottfried, Gary Yale, Lea
h Bishop, Elizabeth Yale, Pastor Sweetie Williams, and Manasa Tangalin for generously sharing your time and knowledge, and in many cases introducing me to people who would become integral to the book.

  Amy Einhorn is the best editor alive. Amy, your insight, intelligence, persistence, and patience made my book better. The fact that you went into labor while writing my editorial letter and completing your daughter’s last kindergarten application made this book a true labor of love. A thousand thank-yous. Thanks also to Caryn Karmatz Rudy for filling in with such grace and ease, Jamie Raab, Emily Griffin, Roland Ottewell, Nicola Goode, and special thanks to Wendy Sherman.

  David Ritz, again and again, thank you. Many thanks to Shirley and Jim Eisenstock, Madeline and Phil Schwarzman, Susan Pomerantz and George Weinberger, Susan Baskin and Richard Gerwitz, Edwin Greenberg and Elaine Gordon, Randy Turtle, Katie O’Laughlin and everyone at Village Books, and The Cousins—Lini, Lorraine, Dee Dee, Alan, Chris, and Loretta and Brian—who will all be guiding Ben and Nathan into the kindergarten battle sooner than you know it.

  During the writing of The Kindergarten Wars, my son went through the process of applying to college. I’m not sure which process is more harrowing, applying to kindergarten or college, but somehow our family has survived. Jonah and Kiva, you are both extraordinary. Thank you for putting life in perspective and keeping me sane.

  Bobbie, you are my best friend and toughest critic. Simply put, if something passes the Bobbie Test, I know it’s good. For more years than I care to count, I’ve been taking the test and, for the most part, passing. Thank you.