Recently, Sean and his father struck a deal: Dad, a fund manager on Wall Street, gives his son $50 to $100 when he gets an A or B; Sean pays it back when he earns a lower grade. So far, he’s ahead. His parents are holding their breath. “The truth,” his mother admits, “is that we’re just trying to get him out of high school.”

After more than a decade of research and press about learning disabilities and the controversial practice of medicating children as young as 4, New York private and public schools are alert, if not hypersensitive, to the earliest signs of trouble. At the same time, an ever-expanding legion of specialists is helping kids with learning issues decode language and handle the rigorous homework and exams that competitive private schools demand. All this attention allows many bewildered, underachieving elementary-school kids to make substantial gains and perform much more like the intelligent children they are.

But when these tutored and tested and often medicated kids reach adolescence, many of them hit a wall. “Being identified early is not enough,” Hacker explains. “This is a lifelong issue. Many kids come to me with tons of remediation behind them, but without the knowledge of what to expect in middle and high school.”

Absent such preparation, says Hacker, the Johnny Can’t Read kid has a good chance of becoming Johnny Who Doesn’t Care. He’s taller than his parents, he has a mind of his own, and he’s a master at wearing them down. Maybe he’s failing out of the private school his parents pulled strings to get him into and hired tutors to keep him in. Maybe he’s spending more and more time with his skateboarding pals, thrill-seeking and smoking weed to insulate himself from daily failure. Or maybe he (or she—though girls display subtler signs and tend to be diagnosed later, these are equal-opportunity disorders) is sweet but isolated, a kid who swims painfully alone in the social stream, blaming the alienation on himself.

And here’s the cruelest irony: In a city rich with educational resources, the number of schools willing and able to handle their challenges is alarmingly small. Getting into a good private nursery school is child’s play compared with the applications-to-admissions ratio at Winston Prep and the Churchill School, the only two high schools in Manhattan established solely for kids with learning disabilities—and yes, both are named after the former prime minister of Britain, who was dyslexic. Churchill, which expanded its program past middle school just two years ago to help meet the demand, stopped taking applications for next year after 150 had been received—for about eight slots. “Word on the street, one mother told me,” says Kristy Baxter, head of the Churchill School and its related center, “is that we’re harder to get into than Harvard.”

To be sure, all children become more vulnerable as they slouch toward adulthood. Social demands escalate, schoolwork becomes more sophisticated, and hormones wreak havoc. But kids with learning disabilities and ADD experience a double whammy: Just as they are beset by increased self-consciousness and a raging desire to strike out on their own, their academic struggles reach a crescendo. Going from the safety of one classroom to the confusion of many, given hours of homework and assignments requiring abstract thinking, youngsters who floundered in elementary school can find themselves drowning.

A sense of safety—and relief at not being out of sync—is high on most teens’ lists when they recite the benefits of these schools. It comes from smaller classrooms, individualized attention, and teachers who respect that they learn differently and who help them understand themselves. Sam Rivers, the late artist Larry Rivers’s son, was also part of Churchill’s charter ninth grade. “Churchill was the fertilizer for a seed that was inside of me,” he muses. “I’ve gained a lot of self-confidence. At my old school, I was the weirdo.”

The comfort level is so high that the kids here—smart, creative, and as vivacious as any teenagers—bristle at being singled out. “Why do you have to keep referring to this as a ‘special’ school?” a junior wanted to know when I visited Churchill. “Just because we learn differently, I’m still a normal kid.”

Dylan Clark, a junior at Winston, made a similar point to an administrator: “This school shouldn’t market itself as an LD school, but as a school that teaches interestingly. I know tons of kids who aren’t LD but can’t learn because school is too boring.”

Here in “Tutor City”—a term coined by Richard Soghoian, headmaster of LD-friendly Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School—15 to 25 percent of students in private schools are kept afloat by therapists, tutors, and homework helpers. A Roper Poll conducted in 2000 helps explain why: 48 percent of parents feel that having the LD label is more harmful than struggling privately with a learning disability. And in a city where children’s schools are chits of social currency, observes Regina Price, a Manhattan attorney, “there are people who give their kids five days a week of tutoring and therapy for fear of not having the child at one of the right schools.”