I’d been saving up to write about New York private schools – possibly the subject I have dwelled on most obsessively for the past fifteen years – until my children got out of them.
But it’s likely that Jack Grubman and Sandy Weill and an injudicious use of e-mail will have an effect on independent schools – a rarefied circle of these schools, at least – similar to the effect pedophilic priests in Boston have had on the Catholic Church. There’s no hiding anymore. It’s all going to come out.
This is what money buys.
Let me first come clean as to what bank or institution or sugar daddy or influence peddler has secured my children’s ascension, as Citigroup underwrote Jack Grubman’s kids’ entrance to the 92nd Street Y preschool.
That would be my wife, Alison: Brearley class of 1970. Her legacy is a kind of pass, or lifetime membership, or punched ticket, evidently as valuable as a “strong buy” recommendation for AT&T and a million-dollar gift from Citigroup.
She provides our children entrée not just to schools that are, in Mr. Grubman’s description, “harder than Harvard” to get into, but to the entire Upper East Side culture – which is surely what this is about. The faded world of Holden Caulfield and Henry Orient and Butterfield 8 and the Knickerbocker Grays (if you have to ask, you’re going to have to donate more) as well as the shinier new world of the investment-banking community.
I was, when I first met my wife, an ambitious know-nothing from New Jersey (I went to an upwardly mobile private day school, but its celebrity children were the children of mobsters and golf-course developers), alternately mystified and amused by the folk customs and secret rituals she had to impart about this weird archipelago of privilege and status. Among the islands in her tales were Dalton, Trinity, Spence, Chapin (the day before our wedding, my wife’s distraught mother told my wife that she would have had much better marital prospects if only she’d gone to Chapin), Collegiate, Nightingale, Horace Mann, Brearley. (Here’s a secret-ritual detail: the nude posture pictures taken of generations of Brearley girls well into the modern age. What are the chances they still exist somewhere in some school closet or fetishist’s file?) Then there’s the uniformed-nanny world of feeder preschools, and, for really doctrinaire East Siders, the boys K-to-9’s (Buckley, St. Bernard’s, Allen-Stevenson), which lead to boarding schools.
Still, in my twenties, I thought this world, this Wasp culture, was not just ridiculous and long-in-the-tooth but dying too. I thought I was rescuing Alison.
Well, as it happened, neither of us paid any real attention when our daughter, Elizabeth, applied to preschool (there is something odd about adults’ even saying the word preschool – saying it as though preschool were a monumental life passage, a historic institution). We weren’t ready for this – we’d deal with such stuff later. Any nursery school would do … whatever. But then Elizabeth, age 3, didn’t get in – anywhere.
Now, I would not have thought that Jack Grubman and I have much in common. And yet I understand what he was willing to trade his honor for.
There were, suddenly, when Elizabeth was turned down, two stark paths: a hopeful one and a lesser one. And there were two kinds of parents: ones who made the effort and ones who did not. And two kinds of New Yorkers: the in and the out. Wounded in some deep place, I screamed at Alison to fix it. I became, I believe, seriously unhinged.
Alison, finally accepting or acquiescing to her place in the social order, got on the phone. I do not even think it took her that many calls. No bribes. No money. Just a little chatting. Just being an insider, and knowing what an insider knows. The next day, Elizabeth was accepted at the much-vaunted All Souls School on 80th and Lexington.
See Also
•Top 20 NYC Preschools
Discussion
•Preschool Panic
An elite nursery school? How much is really at stake? How to get in?
Web Resources
•GoCityKids.com
User ratings and reviews of many New York private preschools.
•SmallTownBrooklyn.com
Brooklyn preschools listed by neighborhood.
The Bibles (or Guidebooks)
• Manhattan Directory of Private Nursery Schools
• Manhattan Family Guide to Private Schools
• City Baby : The Ultimate Guide for New York City Parents from Pregnancy to Preschool
Related Stories
•Failing at Four
Nowadays, the rat race begins in nursery school (November 15, 1999).
•The $28,995 Tutor
The east side’s hottest independent college counselor (April 16, 2001).
• Top of Their Class
A list of the best high schools you can’t afford to miss (October 22, 2001).
I wonder how that would make Jack Grubman feel (as “someone,” he confided to Sandy Weill, “who grew up in a household with a father making $8,000 a year”). I wonder if influence like my wife’s (Alison, in the face of my great trepidation, applied for our daughters after preschool only to Brearley; and for our son, only to Collegiate – where the director of admissions is a Brearley girl) is exactly the reason he felt justified leveling the playing field with his own kind of influence. And why not? Isn’t it good that anyone can acquire influence to balance the influence of people who were born with it?
Why they would want to is another question.
It’s confounding, but true, that most people in New York are not dying of regret that their children are not in these schools. Even among the seriously upwardly mobile, most do not have these deep pangs. I know people downtown who – hard to believe – could not readily tell you the difference between Episcopal and Brick, between Spence and Nightingale. This could mean they’re not smart enough to appreciate value as Jack Grubman does (on the other hand, he thought WorldCom had value), or they’re wise enough to suspect it’s all a crock, or so selfish as to think they might have better uses for their dough – of course, they could just be too poor to compete in this world.
Or it could be that Jack Grubman and I and a few thousand highly parochial others are part of a separate world, with specialized, even slightly perverse values and needs.
We, it seems, have a greater craving for validation, for competitive success, for status, for institutional acceptance, for class standing (we are the real soldiers of American ambition and everyone else is a civilian, I think we feel) – for having something tangible, some identifiable brand, to show for our troubles. And possibly – and this should not be underestimated – for taking something that used to belong to somebody else. (I’ll take that social milieu. Throw in some extra uptightness.) We’re drawn to the exclusive thing, the formal thing, the Establishment thing – like Ralph Lauren to the Rhinelander Mansion. Jack Grubman’s nursery-school payoff, in other words, is just a logical extension of what makes Jack Grubman Jack Grubman.
We are not so exceptional or perverse, of course. As class barriers have fallen and private education has become a more meritocratic enterprise (well, meritocratic in the sense of your parents’ having succeeded in the meritocracy), vastly more people everywhere in the country are applying and donating and tapping connections and getting their children tutored and arranging internships and hiring essay writers, all in an effort to get into some formerly off-limits heaven-on-earth school.
Still – I don’t think I have to argue this – the connections are grander, the dollars greater, the life-and-death struggle more dramatic, here in Manhattan and most of all on the Upper East Side (there are important West Side schools, too, which does not so much change the demographic point as introduce the parallel and ever-converging competition of Wasps and Jews into the equation – indeed, the Grubman brouhaha involves a Jewish school on the East Side).
So what are we getting? Or, what do we think we’re getting?
True, as Jack says, “there are no bounds for what you do for your children.” But I’ve never known a rich guy who at some point didn’t want a return on his investment (the big donations together with the $300,000 in ordinary costs to get your kid from preschool through the twelfth grade). What’s more, there are lots of normal upper-middle-class Manhattanites sucking up like crazy to get into these schools, and then straining mightily to pay these bills.
Certainly, we think we’ll be absolved of future guilt – going all-out now means we won’t have to blame ourselves later. But surely it’s something more (who hasn’t rationalized guilt in cheaper ways?). Something much grander draws us.
It’s a notion of perfection. And of order. A Platonic ideal.
When you show up at these schools, you can’t not be bowled over by the scene. These kids look perfect! Straight from a high-end catalogue. The catalogues imitate these kids – they are the archetype! This is no overnight tradition. They’ve been working on carriage and posture here for generations – and truly, they don’t slouch very much; there really isn’t much visible attitude. From the groomed and tended preschool youngsters to the gamine girls and Harry Potter boys lounging in common rooms and on window seats – there are no sore thumbs. This is incredible packaging. This is what the rich are supposed to look like. And the better the school, the better the packaging. The better the school, the stricter the homogeneity of style and tone and manners. (This is actually the result of a harsh Darwinian process: You have to look or fit the part to get in, and then, if you don’t continue to stay in character, you’re weeded out – indeed, almost no amount of money can keep a misfit or underperformer in.)
Who isn’t, even unreasonably, attracted to the idea that the right circumstance, milieu, window seats, might help make a perfect kid?
There is, of course, a stricter economic interpretation. Value is created by supply and demand. The greater the chance that you can’t get it, the greater the desire to get in, the greater the willingness to pay the price – and to believe it’s really worth it. In other words, the admissions Sturm und Drang is self-perpetuating. The more they extort you, the more you want to be extorted.
There’s more:
There’s the pure joy of not being rejected (happiness being nothing but the remission of pain).
There’s the perceived higher value of your children – you no longer have just a kid, you have a 92nd Street Y kid, or a Spence daughter, or a Horace Mann son. It’s something you can take to the bank. It’s a social currency – even a business currency. You’ll drop the name of your kid’s school – you will.
There’s your recalibrated social station – you enter a truly exclusive club, and a wildly charming novel of manners. (There is, too, for many, a more subtle sense of diminished social station, which grows over time when you realize that everyone is richer than you – you’re the person lingering uncomfortably at the fringe of parent cocktail parties.) Very public people become part of your private life. It’s surreal. There was the time Itzhak Perlman called me up to ask if it was okay if he took his daughter and mine to see Wayne’s World. While it is important to be cool, everybody is also giddy with in-ness and proximity (to be fair, the giddiness is much greater in Los Angeles private schools; the L.A. people, interestingly, seem less cool about this than New Yorkers).
There’s peace in your household – rejection can be a marital disaster, a grievance carried for years. Who did not make the calls? Who failed to write the letters – or write good enough letters? Who did not know when and how to offer the money?
There’s a (temporary) quieting of your own unquiet ambitions – it is, of course, about you. There is the earning of position as a certain kind of New Yorker – an official New Yorker, a sophisticated New Yorker. It’s a tribal thing.
Nursery school is where it begins – it’s a portal, or, perhaps more accurately, a test. The first test. (The fact is, many of these schools get easier to get into rather than harder; but there is something about being at the starting line, about being the first out of the box, about being the early bird.) Are you up to it?
Of course, there is the issue of whether Jack Grubman really, in the end, wants to be a member of a club that would have him.
My wife’s Brearley class differs substantially from my daughters’ classes. My wife’s classmates were children of writers (predominantly, it seems, New Yorker writers), Columbia academics, publishers, doctors, and lawyers as well as socialites and product brand names – most of whom have largely been replaced in my daughters’ classes by the children of people in the financial industry. This clearly mirrors what has happened in the city itself – banking, providing never-before-imagined levels of cash flow and vastly scaled-up net worths, has changed these schools as it has changed (sleeked up, amped up, intensified, competified) Manhattan life.
Money, in other words, really, really big money, is everywhere. Money is the mother’s milk of private education – as distorting and corrupting as it is to politics and to executives and accountants whose compensation depends on a market uptick.
Money, of course, understands and accepts the ways of money.
It’s widely assumed, for instance, that the 92nd Street Y is pretty much off limits for anyone without a major donation or major connection. All Souls, where Alison so easily opened the door, is, after a preference for church members (joining a church is a back door to various preschools), siblings, and people who know people, mostly a closed world.
Spence seems like a kind of banana republic for people with boatloads of dough; its billionaires are would-be Noriegas.
Dalton, with large aspirations but a shallow endowment, will do anything to attract more billionaires.
Collegiate, with some West Side consciousness, often seems in a moral dilemma about its billionaires (although it certainly has as many as any other school – and has a special penchant for media moguls); its former headmaster was strongly criticized for being too cozy with investment bankers.
Brearley, playing it ever-so-close to the vest, acts as though it were unaware of its billionaires: Aren’t we all just folks? Can’t we all just get along?
Now, the issue, in a further complication, is not just that money is a weighted factor in every admissions decision. It is not just that every year the number of truly open positions is winnowed down by the pressure of money (every new centa-millionaire who comes into the system comes with a set of people he’s going to be pushing strongly for each year), and that nice kids are left outside and awful kids with punch let in. Nor that money infuses every aspect of the life of each of these schools. But that this is all deeply denied.
The system of denial is exactly why Jack Grubman couldn’t just whip out his checkbook and instead had to do it under the cover of a donation from Citigroup (schools, of course, understand that there is a big value distinction between someone who can write a check and someone who can cause Citigroup to write one).
Denial and artifice are everywhere. It’s a laundering enterprise of the greatest ritual and propriety. (Never ask, “How much?” Or ever demand clear value for what you have given. There is no greater vulgarism than quid pro quo.) Even in Spence’s Panama, you must know how to do the deal.
In part, this denial and artifice reflect the need to prop up the whole range of conceits about these schools (after all, no self-respecting rich person would want to send his children to a school that you could just buy your way into), but, perhaps more profoundly, they also reflect the deep ambivalence (and often real distaste) that these schools – or the people who actually work in these schools – have for the people who are buying their children in.
Consider the disparity between the nursery-school teacher making what a nanny makes and the billion-dollar 3-year-old (with a bodyguard or two) to whom she is teaching “community values”; or the dynamic in the meeting between the $65,000 upper-school administrator and the titan of industry.
The effect, though, is not so much that the schools and teachers bow and scrape (they have a finely honed understanding of when and to whom they must bow and scrape and whom they can high-hand) but rather that they come to understand the full extent of their power (as well as being convinced of their own superiority), and, accordingly, the battle lines are drawn.
These people really know how to manage powerful parents. (It may well be that the rich and powerful like to be slapped around.)
This is a class issue – ALERT: VULGARIAN ON THE PREMISES – but it is also, much more, a power issue. Who is in charge?
The job of the school administrator is to outwit the rich and powerful (while all rich people are valued and despised, the rich and malleable are especially valued and despised). It is to get as much as he can from the rich while giving in return as little control as possible. (Interestingly, a school that gets a reputation for being controlled by its wealthy parents is thought to be a lesser school.)
Almost all administrators have perfected a language of diffuseness and avoidance and euphemism (in the girls’ schools, every issue is reduced to eating disorders). A good private-school administrator is a Clausewitz of passive aggression. The schools have the ultimate weapon, too, of possession of the children; everybody is fearful of how it will “affect my kid.” Special tutoring? Ritalin? Lukewarm college recommendations? The boot? And so, in almost every negotiation – and every discussion is a negotiation – parents lose.
On some level, the issue is an irresolvable conflict and long-simmering war between Alison’s school and Jack Grubman’s school – Jack is paying for the former while, of course, creating the latter.
So the artifice is breathtaking.
Against the background of vast corruption in any private school of any standing, there is an intense, near-religious focus on tradition, standards, values, and preparation, together with vast, almost theatrical, amounts of homework and a Stepford degree of conformity (helped by that constant weeding-out of the people who just don’t fit in) and an ever-more-idealized notion of our community (this includes the diversity thing – a weird, horrifying elephant in the middle of the table – wherein perfectly innocent kids from more normal worlds are forced into this drama of artifice and denial). The more corrupt, the better the school – or the better the pretense of a better school.
The interesting and ironic result is that at the end, after all the struggle to be a part of this, nobody is too happy with the outcome (it starts happy, with great cosseting and niceness, and then, slowly, the tensions build). The price is too high, the pretense too demanding, the negotiating too exhausting, the pressure too great. It is not too much of an overstatement to say that every parent, no matter how little or how much he or she has paid, graduates from the rich-school experience with a chip on his or her shoulder. Was it worth it? is the silent and traumatic question.
And yet, possibly because the alternative would be to admit that we have not only wasted millions of dollars and vast reserves of psychic energy but maybe even screwed up our kids, we do believe we have paid the going price for more-perfect children.
I’m not sure Jack Grubman, who has clearly messed up his chances for such perfect offspring, should be so unhappy to be out of this game.
Plus: Top 20 NYC Preschools >>>
See Also
•Top 20 NYC Preschools
Discussion
•Preschool Panic
An elite nursery school? How much is really at stake? How to get in?
Web Resources
•GoCityKids.com
User ratings and reviews of many New York private preschools.
•SmallTownBrooklyn.com
Brooklyn preschools listed by neighborhood.
The Bibles (or Guidebooks)
• Manhattan Directory of Private Nursery Schools
• Manhattan Family Guide to Private Schools
• City Baby : The Ultimate Guide for New York City Parents from Pregnancy to Preschool
Related Stories
•Failing at Four
Nowadays, the rat race begins in nursery school (November 15, 1999).
•The $28,995 Tutor
The east side’s hottest independent college counselor (April 16, 2001).
• Top of Their Class
A list of the best high schools you can’t afford to miss (October 22, 2001).