'A child's future is set by nursery
school'
Forget the rich and famous. In Manhattan, the directors of pre-schools
have become the new power brokers
 |
| |
|
Woody Allen is among parents
dropping off their children at the prestigious 92 Street Y
in New York City, which rejected Madonna's daughter but
accepted the offspring of actors Michael J. Fox and Kevin
Kline. Because admission to desirable elementary schools can
depend upon where a child attended pre-school, many
Manhattan parents hire consultants to aid them in the fierce
competition for nursery enrolment spots.
|
|
Parental pressure to succeed starts early
in Manhattan, where the jockeying to get into Harvard or Yale begins with
nursery school. Anne Marie Owens met with one of New York City's top
admissions consultants to hear the tales of just how far these desperate
parents will go to ensure their child gets into their pre-school of choice.
- - -
The man on the other end of the line is
calling for help getting his child into the right school. What he wants to
know, says Roxana Reid, one of the city's hottest school admissions
consultants, is whether she will take him on as a client and how soon she
would get started.
"The thing is, this guy was calling
us five hours after his baby was born. We told him to hang up the phone. We
said, 'Go back to your wife and baby. Get back to us later.'
"That's the craziness of this,"
says Reid, who has even had childless couples come to her Smart City Kids'
workshops, for which they charge US$195 for a 2 1/2-hour session of prepping
for school interviews.
This is the mad dash of navigating
private-school admissions in Manhattan, where the push starts earlier than
ever and the topsy-turvy educational hierarchy has made nursery school
directors into kingpins.
It is no longer about getting into the
right high school. It is not even about getting into the right elementary
school. These days, it is all about getting into the right pre-school
program. Miss out on the top nursery school, the thinking goes, and Harvard
or Yale will forever remain out of reach.
"It begins at age two, and it all
culminates in kindergarten," says Reid. "The thinking is, if you
don't get it right at the beginning, then you're done.... This is really the
way these parents are thinking: They believe the child's future is set by
nursery school."
Reid, a former school social worker and
children's advocate in New York's Mayor's Office, is among a handful of
insiders who have managed to parlay their savvy knowledge of the
inner-workings of the private school world into a highly paid consultancy.
So far, there has been no shortage of Manhattan parents willing to pay
US$2,500 to hire Smart City Kids to help get their children into the right
nursery school. At IvyWise Kids, another Manhattan agency, the consultant's
fee can run up to about US$4,000.
- - -
Parental angst about education is at a
peak. At a national education conference held in New York last week, Wendy
Mogel, a Los Angeles clinical psychologist much sought after for her
down-to-earth parenting advice, opened her talk about parental expectations
of schools with an anecdote about a patient she had recently seen.
The mother came to her, crestfallen,
because her child had been rejected from every kindergarten to which they
had applied, and, said Mogel, "the mother said, 'This day is worse for
me than the day my father died.'"
The telling anecdote brought a
collective, knowing gasp from the audience, which included thousands of
private school teachers and administrators from across North America who
knew exactly what Mogel was talking about. But the story had particular
resonance for the hometown crowd, for only in this city's hypercharged
school-selection climate does the weight of parental expectations impose
such a heavy burden and cause such delirious panic so early on.
This is the worst time of year for many
of Reid's clients. By mid-February, all of the top nursery schools have sent
out their letters announcing which applicants they've accepted for the
coming September.
"If it's a thick envelope, you're
in," says Reid. "If it's a thin envelope, you're not. For those
families who got in, they were ecstatic, they couldn't be happier. It was
the biggest day of their lives." Those who received rejection letters
were devastated, and the many families whose names were added to waiting
lists entered a painful form of societal purgatory. "All of a sudden,
it's not just about their child's future, it's their future," says
Reid. "It's thinking about moving outside the city, it's repositioning
themselves so they're in the right place for one of the good public schools,
it's thinking about whether they need to get new jobs.
"They're asking, 'Why? Why did this
happen? Why aren't we good enough? What's wrong with my child? Should we
have him evaluated? What do we do now? Who can we call?' And -- because
they're New Yorkers, 'How do we get around this?'"
Reid, who when we meet over lunch at a
busy Chelsea eatery is down-to-earth, candid and quick to tell stories that
illuminate the madness of the process, still feels a bit conflicted about
her situation. As a Manhattan mother, with two children aged 5 and 11 for
whom she must expertly navigate this system, she sees the craziness of the
current hype about the pre-school admissions game; yet, as an independent
businesswoman whose company thrives the more convoluted and impenetrable the
system becomes, she is also beholden.
"It's really a strange position to
be in," she says. "I'm a mother and so I resent this crazy
process, but it's also my business, and so ..."
Her consulting fee buys year-long
guidance into every aspect of the admissions process, from the phone-tag
strategy required to get applications to how to dress for the interview.
Reid has even gone shopping with some of her families to help them pick out
just what outfit to wear for the critical face-to-face.
She helps them complete the nursery
school application (which are themselves costly, since they range from about
US$150-$300 each and the agency advises most families to apply to 10
places), with particular emphasis on the essay component, which requires
them to write about their family and child. This can be a struggle if
they're the kind of people who refer to the nanny for questions about their
child.
She preps parents and children for
in-person interviews, although she insists there's no point trying to feed
answers to a pre-schooler, since it could too easily backfire and look
painfully obvious.
She helps them get the accompanying
letters of recommendation, which are often key to the process since it is
through the backdoor of these letters that families are able to notify the
schools of their "tremendous generosity" and "donor
potential."
New York is a city with a high
concentration of wealthy people. In 2001, Forbes Magazine reported that
40,000 Manhattan families had assets of more than US$10-million.
The city also the highest concentration
of private schools in North America. According to the Parents League of New
York, there are 68 independent schools of all variety in the city. As an
example of how densely packed these exclusive schools can be, consider the
case of the historic Nightingale School, located between Fifth and Madison
Avenues, which is just one of seven all-girls' schools within a tiny
several-block stretch of the city's Upper East Side.
For many years, this combination of a lot
of affluent families and a lot of private schools created a climate of
healthy competition for school spaces. Reid says what tipped the balance was
the economic boom of the 1990s: "All of a sudden, all those people who
always had to leave the city as soon as they had kids, or who only ever had
one child, now they were all staying in the city, having bigger families.
It's the same thing you see happening in the real estate market -- people
are buying up multiple apartments to accommodate their larger
families."
As a result, there is increased
competition for the shrinking number of good apartments, and, likewise, for
the so-called good schools.
"It's all happening so much earlier.
It's this nursery school group that has gotten really hysterical," says
Reid.
"They're listening to everything
about all the schools. They are losing sleep, contemplating whether they can
have another child; they are re-negotiating jobs, figuring out whether they
should be moving.
"Because we try to get them to start
about a year in advance, their child is one or one and a half when they get
started with us."
The new power brokers who have benefited
from this strange set of circumstances are the nursery school directors --
women, and they are almost exclusively women, who now hold the fate of the
city's biggest business titans in their hands.
It is a situation that Reid finds oddly
subversive, since it means that men who have bankrolled entire blocks of
development in the city, who earn many millions a year, and who answer to
nobody, are consistently being rendered powerless before these former
teachers who earn a modest wage of about US$60,000 and have spent much of
their life working away in obscurity.
These are the people who are now calling
the shots, clearly illustrated by what happens every September, when
families are just beginning the application process.
A cluster of schools on the Upper East
Side has declared the day after Labour Day as the day all applications are
handed out according to strict terms of telephone-only requests and no
walk-in business.
"We tell both parents to take that
day off and hire two other people to work the phones so you can get those
calls in early," says Reid.
"We tell them to start at 7:30 or 8
o'clock. By 12 noon, some institutions close out and that's it. You can't
apply for that year. People just can't believe it.
"I had one family come to me in
desperation because they missed out. I told them that I asked them to start
at 7:30 a.m. and they didn't start until 9. It's devastating because if they
don't get the application that day, then it really is over."
Reid says the biggest hurdle at the
beginning is usually convincing the fathers of how this has to be done,
because it is so different from how they are accustomed to operating in
their business world.
She spells out The Rules: "When you
go on a tour, you go through with everybody else, you don't get your own
tour; and when the school calls to give you a time for a tour, you drop
everything to take it, you change that other thing in your calendar. And if
they say, 'But we're talking about billions of dollars,' I say, 'It doesn't
matter.'
"We say to them, 'You can no longer
have your secretary contact the school on your behalf, it has to be you.'
" 'You are not interviewing the
school, you are a supplicant, and you will be paying US$26,000 at the end of
it just to be in that supplicant role,' " she tells them.
"And if you're not willing to do
that, they have a hundred other people who look just like you and have as
much money as you, and for every one of you, there are a hundred other
people willing to accept the supplicant role."
Jack Grubman, a now-disgraced
telecommunications analyst with Citigroup, has become the unlucky poster boy
for this mighty-turned-supplicant role. His fall from grace helped put a
face on the nursery school frenzy after it emerged in a government
conflict-of-interest probe last fall that he may have upgraded his ratings
of a stock in exchange for the boss putting in a good word for Grubman's
twins at their nursery school of choice, the 92nd Street Y. (The commonplace
name is deceiving, since it fails to conjure up the image of a place so
exclusive that Madonna's daughter was rejected while the Bronfman children
and those of actors Michael J. Fox, Kevin Kline and Woody Allen were all
accepted, and which features an outdoor playground with a retractable roof.)
It is not its A-list roster of celebrity
parents that makes the 92nd Street Y so desirable a placement, however, but
rather, the reputation and connections of its director, Nancy Shulman,
"who can turn a wait list into an acceptance just like that," says
Reid.
"Women like this have become very
powerful in their ability to do the brokering that these families
require," and a good word from a powerful nursery school director is
increasingly the only thing standing between the parents getting their child
into the elementary school they really want.
She tells the story of one of her client
families: "A lovely family," she says, "Dad's a doctor, Mom's
a lawyer. Their address is good, they live on the Upper East Side. Their
child did amazingly well on the [pre-kindergarten admissions] test."
"This family is just lovely, but
their child went to a nursery school called Wee Care, and nobody's ever
heard of it. They applied to their elementary schools and ended up being
rejected at 8, wait-listed at 2 and accepted at only one."
Reid says the case was so dire, and the
couple so devastated, that Smart City Kids lifted their usual veil of
secrecy and began openly calling school contacts on their behalf. "When
we approached the schools on the wait list and they asked about the child's
nursery school, we said, 'Wee Care,' and they said, 'Oh puh-lease.' "
There is also something about the
indomitable spirit of the New Yorker that is fuelling this push behind the
nursery schools.
"For most of the families who come
to us, they are already accustomed to getting whatever it is they want.
They've gotten into the co-op they wanted, they've gotten into the best job
they could manage, they have succeeded at everything just to be living in
this city and be doing so well. So it's a sense of entitlement that they're
coming to us with," she says.
"They're spending $15,000 a year on
a nursery school, and more and more, they see this nursery school head as
their broker. They expect results. The three years of nursery school were
all in preparation for this deal of getting into School X. The way they look
at it is, they've already paid $15,000 a year and this is what they want in
return for their investment."
In one of the e-mails made public in the
Wall Street investigation into wrongdoing, Grubman wrote to the stock
company president to whom he was appealing to grease the wheels of nursery
school admissions: "For someone who grew up in a household making
$8,000 a year and attended public schools, I do find this process a bit
strange, but there are no bounds for what you do for your children."
- - Anne Marie Owens
National
Post
|
