Customer Reviews

The Kindergarten Wars: The Battle to Get into America's Best Private Schools

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As a NYC educational consultant who has been helping families get into private school kindergarten since 1999, (I write "families" rather than "children" because the schools judge parents as much as, if not more than, four-year-olds), I can vouch for the original and insightful findings in Eisenstock's book. Eisenstock examines the motives of parents, preschool directors, and continuing school admissions directors. He is the first author to expose the schools' culpability in perpetuating an inhumane process that causes families great stress and sometimes sadness. I was particularly interested in his account of a deluded admissions director who keeps repeating that she acts only "for the kids". In this book, Eisenstock makes it clear that the admissions process is not for the kids at all.

This book concentrates solely - and I do mean solely - on NYC. There are one or two mentionings of other cities in all. If an outsider were looking for a true glimpse into the world of private school applications, they might be satisfied (if they live in NYC, and are white upper-class people). The book could have grown exponentially in quality if the author had bothered to look to a few other cities and met parents of different races, rather than just the one half-Mexican woman he labeled a "diversity" candidate.

The author's outlook on the world seems to be narrower than the list of openings for most of these schools.

This book by Allen Eisenstock is a riveting portrayal of the grueling and often cutthroat world of the college...er kindergarten admissions process.
The book tells the story of several families from slightly different backgrounds, and their long and odyssey-like trip from the land of preschool into the nation's best kindergartens.
Eisenstock's book reads in part like a novel, and also like a documentary.
You really feel for the things that the parents go through as they borrow, beg, and steal to get the "best" education for their children, and at the same time you want to wack them over the head and say, "What are you thinking? These are just little children! Where they go to kindergarten, or whose waitlist they are on does not seal their fate for all eternity, you idiots!" There is one part of the book where a mom, who has been trying valiantly to get her daughter into an elite school says, "You can choose where you go to college and high school, but I choose the kindergarten. It's all about me sweetheart."
Makes you want to barf, huh?
If you are trying to get your child into a prominent school, there are some helpful tips to aid you. I don't think that Eisenstock was as thorough in his documenting of parents from different backgrounds as he could have been. It would have elevated the book's value tremendously.
He also should have included schools from a variety of cities from around the country, instead of focusing primarily on New England.

We applied to private schools last year and had a miserable time of it. If only we had this book to read prior, we probably would have gone about it differently and saved ourselves a lot of headache and heartache.

This was a compelling, entertaining and quick read. Once I started, I could hardly stop reading it. Made it through the whole book in 24 hours. While this is a disguised documentary, it reads just like fiction. The closest experience I could compare this to is fraternity rush - the desperate attempts to impress people at your first choice institutions, pulling strings behind the scenes, the exhilaration of acceptance or the terrible blow of rejection, and coming to accept your ultimate fate. Excellent read.

Does the right kindergarten really help your child get into the right college?

When you are looking into prospective schools for your children, do you know what sort of questions you need to ask? Do you know that your answers on the application to questions like "where did you go to college?" may be one of the most important answers you can give.

In these days of public schools getting less and less funding, more parents are turning to private schools to educate their children. Combine that with the fact that it is becoming more and more fixed in people's minds that in order to get a coveted education at a prestigious university, it helps to have attended the right schools as a child. Also, there are the other facts like more children entering school, and that siblings get first picks at class openings. Competition to get one of the few openings at a private school can be fierce as hundreds of parents compete for the prize of having their child be one of the elite that made it into the class.

Alan Eisenstock has written a narrative book that follows four families through the process of looking at choosing and applying to enroll their child into the kindergarten of their choice. Each prospective family takes us through the process of visiting schools, applying, going through the interview process, and finally waiting to hear whether their child has gotten one of those few coveted openings.

Alan Eisenstock has traveled the country interviewing the heads of many private schools. He has followed and interviewed many families about the processes and what questions that they end up with. His book follows fictional families in a city that could be any big city in the United States. However, he brings us the readers all of the knowledge that he has gleaned from his research to try and answer the one question that parents in the same situations as his families all have: "How do you get in?"

Armchair Interviews says: Interesting look at private kindergartens.

This book is a great starting point for anyone interested in private schools. Although this book names New York as a place where private schools are intensely competitive, in no way is this book geared only toward New York City private schools. I was able to grasp several takeaways that would benefit me in my search (I do not live in New York).
Additionally, I really appreciated the sections of the book that spoke about middle class families and their options when applying to private schools. Many books will not cover middle class options, give only a brief overview, or make you feel hopeless.
Although this book is not the `holy grail" of getting into private schools, it does give great information and provide wonderful examples of diverse (socially & economically) families maneuvering their way through the process.

This book provides an insider's look into the private school application process. However, it could have been even better had the author included at least one racial minority. The one "White" woman who only identified as Mexican for this process was insufficient. Similiarly, the gay couple whose Black child (perhaps born to a crack addict) had a learning disability provided more comic relief than insight. It also seemed to reinforce stereotypes about gays and Blacks. The author seemed uneasy even discussing non-Whites, since he used terms such as "diverse" candidates. Moreover when referring to outreach to Black students, the admissions directors did not seem to realize that there are indeed middle and upper income Blacks; every Black does not reside in the inner city. The author, while citing Black Enterprise magazine, still did not expand on this point. It really would have good to see how the process differed for a non-White, middle class family.