Ciao, Chapin. So long, Spence.
A Manhattan mother is suing her daughter’s former pre-school because, in her view, the school turned out to be “one big playroom”, rather than the grind factory she had hoped for when she initially wrote the check for $19K/a year.
Lucia Imprescia’s first year at York Avenue Preschool was promising enough to have her mother sign on for year two. But a month into the “school year”, Nicole Imprescia felt that the curriculum was being dumbed down. Her daughter was spending her work days with a bunch of clueless two-year olds whose curriculum focused on shapes and colors – BOR-ING – rather than on the meatier, more challenging tutelage Lucia would need to ace something called the ERB test.
ERB (founded in 1923 as the Educational Records Bureau, and now going by its more stream-lined acronym) serves the nation’s elite (or at least the branch located in NYC) in two ways. It provides the Independent School Entrance Exam, which I take it is the SAT for prep schools, and the Early Childhood Admissions Assessment, or ECAA:
ECAA One-to-One (Early Childhood Admissions Assessment–One-to-One): A uniform testing program that eliminates testing at each school to which a child may be applying. Parents select participating schools to receive and use the results as part of their broader admission process for Pre-K - Grade 4.
(ERB also offers this:
ECAA Online (Early Childhood Admissions Assessment–Online): Coming Fall 2010. A child-centered, computer-adaptive admissions assessment for candidates to Pre-K – Grade 1.
They can’t possibly have kids take this in the “privacy” of their own homes, can they? It must be in-person. How else – other than with expensivo Cisco telepresence gear – could they get around the cheating parents? Not that any parent would cheat to get their kid into a prestigious Manhattan pre-school. Hmmmmm. Wonder if they go so far as to have ringers take the tests for their little ones? Elite School Teacher A to Elite School Teacher B: I seem to remember that little Florian had dark hair and a far richer vocabulary.)
But, in one version or another, the ECAA is, presumably, the test that the York Avenue Preschool failed to prepare Lucia Imprescia for, dooming the poor child to a life of abject, squalid mediocrity – middle management at an insurance company, marriage to a high-school phys-ed teacher, a 1960-era raised ranch in some cheek to jowl Long Island suburb.
Anyway, the NY papers were a-buzz last week with squawk about the suit. Here’s a bit from The NY Times:
The suit charges that preschool education is critical to a child’s success in life, quoting from various news articles. “It is no secret that getting a child into the Ivy League starts in nursery school,” says one. “Studies have shown entry into a good nursery school guarantees more income than entry into an average school,” says another.
Ms. Imprescia (the elder) is seeking on behalf of Ms. Imprescia (the younger) “exemplary damages, costs and attorney’s fees”.
The suit said the school refused Ms. Imprescia’s demand to return that year’s tuition. It did not say whether Lucia had taken the test.
But that’s the staid old Gray Lady, whose readership likely includes the sorts of folks who fret about their kids’ performance on the ECAA and ISEE.
The grittier, blue-collar, more overtly class-conscious Archie Bunker Daily News had far more interesting and florid scoop:
In court papers, Nicole Imprescia suggests York Avenue Preschool jeopardized little Lucia's chances of getting into an elite private school or, one day, the Ivy League.
She's demanding a refund of the $19,000 tuition and class-action status for other toddlers who weren't properly prepped for the standardized test that can mean the difference between Dalton and - gasp! - public school…
Fortunately, Imprescia's lawyer said, the tot's prospects aren't doomed.
"Lucia Imprescia, for the record, will get into an Ivy League school - York Avenue Preschool notwithstanding," said [Matthew] Paulose, of the firm Koehler & Isaacs.
God knows there’s plenty to make fun of/be alarmed at here:
- The image of the pushy, status-obsessed NY parent.
- Kids being pressured to make the grade at age 4, when they mostly want to make jokes about whose butt stinks.
- Worrying about Princeton for a toddler. (Let the scratching and clawing, the legacy donations, the child differentiating – Come on, Tristan, you’ll stand a much better chance if you’ve written an operetta or taught yourself Braille and ASL or raised $100K for a girls’ school in Afghanistan, than if you insist on being a second-string Little Leaguer because you “like” baseball. Listen, pal, what you like has precious little to do with it. Daddy’s not busting his ass as a hedgie so you can do as you please.
- The lawyer who’s arguing against a leg of the law suit he’s bringing. If Lucia’s smart enough to get into an Ivy without the help of the York Avenue Preschool, this doesn’t exactly bolster the claim that they’ve damaged her chances.
- The fear about the dumbed-down color-shape curriculum. (I think back to my sister’s reaction when she realized from her three year old daughter’s description of the dog with a target around his eye that the kids in her pre-school had logged some time watching the Little Rascals. Maybe the lesson that day was about The Great Depression, or the history of black and white entertainment?)
But Ms. Imprescia the Elder is probably on to something.
The world is increasingly the oyster of the few, the proud, the global elite. And these folks do tend to go to Ivy (or thereabouts) universities. While these institutions may not be fully meritocratic in their approach, they do offer opportunities for the little guy to improve his lot. But in “real life” an awful lot of the opportunities go to the children of the few, the proud, the global elite who have the grades, the SATs, and the c.v.’s to make them attractive applicants. All in a very meritocratic sense, if you discount the leg up that being the type of kid who goes to a fancy private school (or an excellent public school) has over some poor schnook from Palooka-ville whose parents don’t know there’s a difference between a degree from Yale and one from Just Around the Corner Community College.
Personally, I’m not sure that being part of the few, the proud, the global elite is necessarily what you’d want for yourself or your kid. (I will confess to an occasional miffy fit because I didn’t go to an upper echelon college that might have gained me entry into this swirl…If only I had a completely different personality!)
But are we not watching the economy being hollowed out and the country shift ever-closer to oligarchy-control (or worse)? Don’t we all sometimes get the pit-in-the-stomach feeling that someday soon there’ll be the tiny number of glittering them, an ever-larger lumpen other, and – for the rest of us - a scrounge around the midden pile that’s left for the incredibly shrinking number of middle class jobs out there?
Forget about the competition to get into the global elite. What about the fight to stay in the middle of the middle?
Nicole Imprescia’s may look silly, but I can guarantee that she’s not the only one worried about making sure her child has a shot at “it.”
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