College Preparatory

Today I interviewed for a position at a Charter School which aims to be College Preparatory. When I stated that all high schools are college preparatory -- or aim to be -- I was told that it is a "communications issue" -- that the school will have to find a way to say it is academically rigorous/competitive without being selective. Perhaps, the school would like people to self-select out who aren't interested in going Ivy League and would like to find a way to present this while still being politically correct. I mean, they could just call themselves "the middle class alternative to Horace Mann." That might backfire however.

I've never met a kid in my life who wasn't interested in the opportunity to train to become Ivy League Material. Nor have I ever met a parent who didn't believe his/her kid deserved the chance.

What I wanted to say, but of course didn't right then (they can certainly read this blog posting) is: whom do you expect to be teaching? It's not as though I don't believe the average kid off the street couldn't be prepared for Princeton. To the contrary, I think you can build a student if you have the time, resources and commitment from the student and parents. However, the organizers of this school don't seem to be aware that the students whom they reach will not have much of a foundation when they arrive at their doorstep. Their reading and math skills are going to be poor, or mostly so. Their behavior will be challenging, and as their frustrations grow, it will get worse. A strong system has to be in place to reinforce the culture and methods of the school. There will also need to be strong incentives for the students and parents to buy into the school philosophy.

They won't just be able to hold up the flags of Harvard, Yale and Columbia and expect students to go hopping. Students need tangible reasons to believe these names still matter, and who could blame them. Eight years of Yale and Harvard educated "Nucular" Bush, and our students have had a very concrete lesson in what happens when you know the right people and you don't know anything else. I hardly think that people who apply to Yale do so with the Shrub in mind -- and those who are applying generally have a sense of tradition which goes with the school and reaches beyond the past eight years. That, however, is a small section of the population and not necessarily a part of the public school population. Even of the elitist public school population.

Many of my friends have students in the public schools because they can't afford private schools. They don't anticipate being able to send their kids to private colleges either. For them, SUNY Binghamton, Buffalo, Albany, Queens, Hunter and Brooklyn are going to have to suffice -- as the latter three once did in the 50's and 60's when people usually only attended private schools when they couldn't get into the best CUNY's. When someone who went to school in that era mentioned going to NYU, they didn't usually do so with pride -- it was testimony to their failure to get into Queens, Brooklyn or Hunter. Without the major financial aid which exists now, few people could afford Columbia, Barnard and Cornell. This held true even for graduate school. My uncle won the Regents Scholarship in Dentistry and wanted to go to Harvard's Dental School but they couldn't match the financial aid, so he went to NYU.

I remember, back in 1985, how many of my fellow graduates from Stuyvesant went to Binghamton. Most of them got into Ivy League schools but couldn't afford to go. Believe me, if there is any student who wants to go to an Ivy League school, it is a graduate of Stuyvesant. People were already practical by then and realized what was affordable and what was not. I was lucky that I grew up so poor that I knew I would get an enormous financial aid package from Barnard.

The guidelines for that kind of financial aid are very strict and many struggling middle class families live well above them.

So, I guess I hope that the planners of the school I spoke with today are ready to meet the needs of their students and to help them to compete for the best education available --- knowing they will start with disadvantages and that they may have to make compromises along the way.

Most importantly, though, they will need to find a reason for students to want this education. Some of my brightest students have chosen technical educations or to go into the military because they don't see a connection between an Ivy League quality education and a steady job. They've met too many teachers from such schools who are constantly worried about their positions, even after years of service. They have brothers and sisters who went to respectable schools and are out of work. Meanwhile, their mechanic friends, their friends in the armed forces and their cab driver friends are still managing.

I'll be curious to see how it works out.