Rich Parents Game the System

In the NYTimes, No Rich Child Left Behind.

The article's point, that rich kids have a huge advantage in college applications, is no surprise. The author is, however, clueless as to the cause.  From the article:

The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students.

Well, no.  The academic gap goes way beyond kindergarten.  I live in an affluent area, and what I see is an entire industry geared toward coaching and packaging rich kids to produce good-looking college applications.  Rich kids spend hours with tutors to learn how to write exactly the kind of essay that will score well on the SAT essay section.  They take exactly the kinds of extracurriculars that colleges want to see.  They are coached through every step in the application process.

There's an ongoing myth that rich kids succeed because their parents read them plenty of bedtime stories, teach them a good work ethic, and demonstrate commitment through a stable marriage.   Pshaw!  I say.  Any of those factors might be important, but it's just the beginning of how rich parents push their kids to succeed.

What really toasts my biscuits is the assertion that rich kids get ahead because they're genetically superior, as shown by their high IQs.  Are you kidding me?  These kids are coached for the IQ test!  That's how the gifted program in New York City works.

From the comments (as usual, better than the article):

from AlexJr60 of New York, NY:

Interesting article, but the writer's research obviously didn't include face-to-face interviews with parents of kids in elite private schools in New York and environs. The kids are programmed from dawn to dusk with every conceivable extracurricular coaching that could help them develop the faintest wisp of a talent of any kind. "Quiet Time" is a non-starter. They are trained to compete from the time they are toddlers; they are exposed to bright highly competitive classmates in school and camp and arts courses and language courses and on and on and on. Most of the parents start them on SAT-prep in the tenth grade. The really top preparation coaches earn as much as the kids' shrinks. The $165,000 income level cited, doesn't even come close to what is spent -- closer to that pretax, is the annual tab for a single kid in a private NYC school who goes to summer camp and has the usual lineup of extra help.

from Minerva19 of Rockland:

We have had an SAT prep program open up in our community. It was not until we enrolled our son that I realized just what an advantage the wealthy have. It didn't teach more math or critical thinking. It taught him how to game the test, when to guess, when not to, how to approach each section. He was able to raise his scores 100 points.

 from Lois Kuster of Lynbrook, NY:

One critical factor that increases the standardized test results of wealthy children is outside tutoring. This is not tracked in studies. Private tutoring starts in the early years of school and continues throughout high school. 

and a reply from Eric B. of Oxnard, CA:

Your post is much too kind. "Private tutoring", which evokes images of young people sitting at home with a tutor, studying subjects in general, very often amounts to joining prep courses offered (at high fees) by groups who have discovered what questions will be on entrance tests and asked in interviews, so the three- and four-year-old children of those who can afford these prep courses can jump ahead of other children. Those of us in the lower classes call this cheating. The rich call us resentful of our betters.

 from lizzie848 of nyc:

I live in Manhattan and work with students on their college application essays. I happen to have a sliding scale and work with kids at all income levels, but the affluent students I work with all have SAT tutors, even the very very brightest of them, and their parents are willing to spend upwards of $300 an hour - and sometimes - so I have heard - $1000 an hour - for this kind of tutoring. I heard of one family whose tutor came to the Southampton summer house to work with the child, and was paid $1000 an hour for all of his time there. I heard of one family that spent $250,000 on tutoring for their child over high school.

from Sharon of Leawood, KS:

So if a wealthy family hires a tutor to ensure their child does well on the SAT, how is that demonstrative of a "love of learning and study"? It's demonstrative of an attitude that success must come at any cost. 

from dclambert in NJ:

As a teacher in an inner city school & a private SAT tutor of the wealthy, I see this phenomenon on the ground.

Wealthy families spend a fortune on their children's education & support in ways that would probably shock the middle class.They have tutors for each subject, hw coaches, etc. They invest at least one year in SAT preparation.

The "meritocracy" is a scam.

Grandparents

We're having a grandparent moment in the blogosphere, from the New York Times' typically navel-gazing Motherlode article to Katie Allison Granju's cheerful confession that her ability to juggle family and career is because of the daily childcare help she receives from her mother-in-law. In the news, we've got the Kelly Williams-Bolar case, in which a single mother claimed her children resided at their grandfather's house. And of course we have a First Family with a First Grandmother in residence.

My husband and I are both descendants of sparse, scattered families. None of my grandparents was a daily (or weekly, or even monthly) presence in my life as a child, and the same is true of my children. None of my siblings or parents lives in the same state that I do, and this is true for my husband, my parents, and my husband's parents as well. Many professional-class families look this way, because professionals follow their careers wherever they might take them, and wind up living far from their family of origin.

What are we missing when we miss daily connections with extended family? We miss continuity and a sense of perspective. It's easier to get caught up in a competitive, destructive pre-professional rat race when your whole world consists of kids competing with each other to build the best college application, and parents who are constantly stressed out by work.

What we Teach Kids about Family Life

The Paper Bag Princess is a modern retelling of the old "damsel in distress gets rescued by handsome prince followed by marriage and happily ever after" fairy tale. In the Paper Bag version, the prince and princess are about to be married when a dragon shows up, burns up the princess' clothes so that she has to wear a paper bag (hence the title), and kidnaps the prince. The princess then tracks down the dragon, wears him out, and rescues the prince. The prince, though, complains that the princess doesn't look pretty any more. The princess tells him he's a jerk and they don't get married.

This book is very popular among left-wing types, and I just noticed that it's listed in the handouts from my younger daughter's school. It was also presented as a play in the school.

I don't like the Paper Bag Princess, and I don't think it's "empowering", as advertised, for several reasons.

1.) It's a parody of a fairy tale that most kids today haven't heard in the first place. We're not living in a culture that encourages young girls to think they'll be rescued by marriage, and we don't need to go out of our way to teach little girls that marriage doesn't mean "happily ever after". Our kids know that already. If their own parents haven't divorced, they've seen divorce in their friends' families.

2.) In a sense, the book is too true to modern life. The princess does everything a man can do; she outwits the dragon and rescues the prince. But at the end of the tale she has no marriage to show for it. This is sadly reminiscent of the choice many women today are faced with -- career or family? Pick one. That's not empowering, either.

3.) The story downplays the importance of marriage as a life choice. For most people, the decisions of whom, or whether, to marry, and when, or whether, or how, to bring children into the family, are enormously important, but, at least in the circles I move in, they are consistently disparaged in favor of "career" choices. When I was a kid, I was often asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I knew that "mother" was not an approved choice. "Lawyer" would have been good, though.

The underlying message is "don't even think about a happy marriage; it doesn't happen."

The Paper Bag Princess reminds me of a project that used to be inflicted on kids in an attempt to discourage teen pregnancy. Kids would be given an egg, or a bag of flour, and told to look after it as if it was a baby. They had to cart it around wherever they went; if they had to leave it, they would need a "babysitter". If I recall correctly, the bag of flour might even be rigged with an alarm clock that would go off at unpredictable times.

The underlying message here is "Babies ruin your life. Whatever you do, don't have one." Is this really what we want to tell our kids? They were very recently babies themselves.

My younger daughter, aged 7, loves to speculate about whether she'll marry (currently she's against it because she thinks it would be disgusting to kiss a boy), and whether she'll have kids, and whether she should give birth or adopt (she herself was adopted.) I like having these discussions, and I'm quick to tell her that I look forward to being a grandmother. I'm not going to tell her, "don't have a baby until you're ready for that kind of responsibility!" Is anyone ever really ready for a baby? You become ready by having one. And I've never heard of a parent who says, "don't get a job until you're ready for that kind of responsibility!"

We've got a culture that valorizes work and denigrates family, beginning at a very young age. It's time for a rethink.