Where the Race Now Begins at Kindergarten

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/nyregion/06private.html?partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

by robg • 18 years ago

8 24 18 years ago

rsheridan6• 18 years ago

Coming from a part of the country where people usually just send their kids to public schools, I find it hard to imagine how a kindergarten admissions committee decide which students to accept. What sort of track record does a 5 year old have? Do they look at the number of papers these kids have published? Is there a preschool version of the SAT?

dpapathanasiou• 18 years ago

It's all about the parents, not the child, e.g.:

"The Wall Street Journal revealed the existence of a series of e-mails, in which former Salomon Smith Barney analyst Jack Grubman discussed his 1999 ratings upgrade of AT&T stock. According to the WSJ, the e-mails indicate that Grubman upgraded AT&T's stock rating from 'hold' to 'strong buy' at the urging of Citigroup Chairman Sandy Weill. In return, Weill is said to have promised to use his influence to get Grubman's daughters' admitted into the nursery school at the 92nd Street Y. Investigators from the New York district attorney's office, who are looking into the matter, say Grubman's twin girls began attending the Y just weeks after Citigroup donated $1 million to the 92nd Street Y's highly regarded preschool. That school is one of a handful of New York City preschools with reputations for sending their alumni on to the most prestigious private elementary and high schools."

time_management7• 18 years ago

Private preschool admissions are based primarily on the socioeconomic status of the parents, as detected during the interview. The child simply has to sit still and look pretty.

Alex39178• 18 years ago

"Is there a preschool version of the SAT?"

Yes, actually. There is a whole battery of standard cognitive tests, as well as common academic tests such as the Peabody Picture Test, which measures vocabulary. Wealthy NYC parents will pay coaches to get their kids ready for these exams. It can be much cheaper in the long run though if you can send your kids to a special public school (magnet or charter or special program) rather than spending 30k a year for private school.

time_management7• 18 years ago

It's too bad that most of the benzos will be off-patent by the time these kids are in college. Otherwise, I'd move my entire net worth into pharma stocks.

There's a paradox one notices when comparing elite college admissions in 1993 vs. 2008. Admissions to top colleges are much harder to attain, but actually a lot less meaningful. The noise in the admissions process seems to have quintupled, due in part to the (often successful) efforts of wealthy parents to beat the system, and the relative inability of admissions offices to detect and counter this trend.

Top colleges are 2-3 times more selective in 2008, with acceptance rates at the Ivies down into the single digits. At the same time, virtually every professor at an elite college will tell you that admitted students are noticeably worse each year, while professors at state schools notice the students getting much better.

I blame the Common Application, which has made it easier to apply to 10+ schools, making the process noisier and, consequently, creating a lot of anxiety on the part of students who previously had a lock on at least one top school (and moreso, on the part of their parents). This led to a positive feedback loop; it bolstered the admissions-gaming industry, which made the process even noisier, which led to more anxiety... ad nauseum.

Alex39178• 18 years ago

Based on casual observation, I'd say the reason student quality is dropping even as top colleges get much more competitive is probably because wealthy kids are less likely to get into top colleges, not more. It used to be that almost everyone who got into a top college was super wealthy, but now grades and SAT scores matter much more. These highly credentialed kids might get better college grades than kids merely from high-SES families, but they generally aren't as smart and don't have the same level of critical thinking skills. If you take classes over the summer you will notice the student quality is much higher, for mostly the reason that the students there are the ones with the most money instead of the best grades (since scholarships don't cover summer classes.)

/Things you can't say

CSchonwald• 18 years ago

where do schools like mit and caltech fit in that continuum then?

time_management7• 18 years ago

Frankly, I don't believe you. No offense, but on this issue, I don't think you know what the fuck you're talking about. Why would you suspect that SES is more predictive of "student quality" than academic accomplishment?

Let's consider IQ, for example, on which there's ample data. IQ is more highly correlated to academic accomplishment (~0.5) than economic/occupational success (~0.4). SES is the success of the parents, which has got to be less predictive of IQ than success of the individual. While IQ is clearly not the right definition of "student quality", the non-IQ components are traits like creativity, ambition, and willingness to work hard. Creativity is probably independent of SES, and the latter two traits, in aggregate, favor working-class students over the rich.

If you take classes over the summer you will notice the student quality is much higher, for mostly the reason that the students there are the ones with the most money instead of the best grades (since scholarships don't cover summer classes.)

If you're talking about high school summer programs, I can speak from experience on this one. I've attended CTY, Mathcamp, and MO(S)P. The first two are probably not affordable to most working-class families (MOP is free to those who qualify). The students at these programs are indeed, as a group, better than elite college students, but this is because these sorts of summer programs are actually a lot more selective than Ivy League undergraduate programs, not because many of them are expensive.

henning• 18 years ago

This phenomenon already exists in Japan and other Asian countries.

sanj2• 18 years ago

I find it unlikely that any advantages conferred by these schools have lasting value.

Instead, I think that they are a salve for the guilt-ridden parents who don't have time to spend on and with their kids because they're off being Masters of the Universe. So they make up for it with money.

I say this as a parent who's cranking away at a startup and have a kid at a day camp. I'd much rather be spending the afternoon boiling a cabbage for his invisible ink experiment.

ars• 18 years ago

>I find it unlikely that any advantages conferred by these schools have lasting value.

There is actually an advantage that lasts: the culture of intelligence.

In most public schools stupid athletes are worshiped, but smart students are teased as geeks, and smart blacks are branded as "acting white".

That is pretty much the only thing determining if it's a good school or not, and why it's worth it to go to a private schools that lauds intelligence.

akd• 18 years ago

Yes but good public schools have that too.

daniel-cussen• 18 years ago

How much path dependence can getting into the right kindergarten have? It used to be that obsessed parents used to sign kids up for Olympic-level athletics that require starting young (gymnastics)[1], piano and violin. These were all pretty marginal ways of helping their kids into college, but the redeeming quality of this kind of gamble was the path-dependence: it was the only way of improving the kid's odds that far out of the high school.

But elite kindergartens? Unless early education improves your IQ permanently (of which I'm not entirely sure) [2], this is stupid. Is the path dependence there?

It's probably a better idea to make sure your kid eats right, gets DHA and creatine, works at a few skills for the ten-odd years it takes to achieve mastery, and leave him/her alone for the most part, because there's nothing else you can do. [3]

[1] Gymnastics, piano and violin are all myelin related, and myelin takes years to configure. Swimming, on the other hand, is much less path-dependent; you can get your muscles, blood and lungs up to spec in a few years.

[2] School improves IQ, but those improvements vanish in the late teens.

[3] Unless you went ahead and got him a Nobel prize sperm donor for a dad. That will give him around 12 IQ points.

Alex39178• 18 years ago

"Is the path dependence there?"

The IQ boost is not permanent. However, schools sort children into ability groups in first or second grade. What track your child gets put into is very important and is fairly permanent, so if temporarily boosting your kid's IQ got them into a good track it would be worth it. (Albeit track sorting is usually done based on verbal ability and not IQ, but similar idea.)

Where the Race Now Begins at Kindergarten

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