Follie per le iscrizioni
alla scuola materna.
A
Manhattan, (il distretto più caro di New York) le famiglie pagano rette annue
salatissime ($15.000, circa 30 milioni) per iscrivere i figli a scuole materne
private, ritenute adeguate ad una carriera di studi che consenta, in seguito,
l’accesso alle High School e alle Università più
prestigiose.
Ma
qualcuno e arrivato a offrire anche un deposito di un milione di
dollari.
By CLARA HEMPHILL
To normal people living
anywhere else, the news that someone might offer a pledge of $1 million just to
get a child into the right nursery school must seem absurd. That an analyst
might recommend a particular stock in order to curry favor with a powerful
banker who might then help that analyst's child win a coveted spot in a nursery
school seems stranger still. But on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the story that
Jack Grubman, the former star telecom stock analyst for Citigroup, attempted to
get his twins into the 92nd Street Y nursery school by changing his rating on
AT&T stock was greeted with knowing nods rather than
disbelief.
Many of my friends have
their own horror tales about nursery school admissions. One friend's daughter
was rejected at the nursery school that is run by the synagogue she had attended
for years. Another friend's daughter was turned away from the nursery school he
attended as a child.
What's fueling the mania?
The combination of runaway wealth and an urban baby boom has made private
nursery school admissions insanely competitive. In a place as rich as Manhattan,
the number of people willing to spend $15,000 a year for a limited number of
private nursery school spots has mushroomed in recent years — partly because
upper-middle-class and wealthy families are increasingly staying in the city
rather than moving to the suburbs.
As college admissions have
become more competitive, well-off parents have become more anxious about their
child attending the right high school. And because most private schools serve
children in grades K-12, admission to kindergarten begins to take on an enormous
importance. A child's entire precollegiate education, some believe, is
determined by how well he does on the admissions tests given at the age of
4.
And nursery school? Any
rational person knows that your child can learn to build with blocks, make
friends and play with Play-Doh at any number of good preschools. The competition
isn't over the quality of the nursery school but the perceived clout of the
nursery school director in gaining admission to the "Baby Ivies" — the private
schools whose students have a reputation for gaining admission to the Ivy
League.
Lest non-New Yorkers think
we're all mad, many of us have found a solution to this lunacy: public
education. New York City has dozens of distinguished public schools. The Upper
East Side, in particular, has public schools in which the quality of teaching
rivals that of the most selective private schools. Even for those who believe
the sole purpose of precollegiate education is to gain admission to a selective
college (a joyless, utilitarian way to view 14 or 15 years of childhood), New
York City's public schools offer a more than respectable alternative to the
private school madness. The most elite public high schools, like Hunter College
High School, Stuyvesant High School and Bronx Science, routinely send the top
quarter or third of their graduates to the Ivy League or other highly selective
schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And the top 25 public
high schools routinely send their best graduates to the Ivies and well-regarded
colleges like Wesleyan, Smith, the University of Chicago and
Oberlin.
Of course, competition for
admission to the best public high schools is fierce as well. But at least
parents can take heart that the doors to opportunity aren't forever closed if
their child is not admitted to the nursery school of their
choice.
Clara Hemphill is author of ``New York City's Best Public Elementary Schools,'' and director of Insideschools.org, an online guide to public schools offered by Advocates for Children of New York.