SmackDown: Should Parents Expect Pricey Preschools to Get Their Kids into the Ivy League?

Listen, I have worked in Pre-k before and I know for a fact that no Pre-K can promise you Harvard or that your child will be better prepared for Harvard. They can promise you that your child will be prepared for Kindergarten but that is it. Any Pre-K that promises Harvard or Yale is lying and just wants your money.

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I actually sent my kids @ 3 to half day pre school two days a week. They thrived! They learned to learn. They learned to go to school - how to sit & listen, follow directions, share, get along with other kids. I was teaching those concepts & principles also. Their "classes" consisted of 6 kids at their table. It was not expensive, but reasonable. They went to a more formal school at 4, again half a day. They're in a competetive highschool, in honors classes and have a 4.0. They work hard for their grades. I cannot afford an ivy league school, but I believe they will get a good education, and I exp;ect them to have at least a Masters degree or more. I did not expect pre K to babysit my child. I believe they learned early to take school seriously. I am eternally grateful I was able to get them into this little homeschool type preK. I believe the most important thing they learned there was how to go to school.

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My friend's daughter is 2. At 20 months, she could recite the alphabet and count to 10. She could also pick out each letter (upper and lower case) randomly. She could pick out numbers from 1-12 randomly. (now, she knows numbers to 20) She knows her shapes and colors.

Her grandmother works with her. As I understand it, she will be reading by age 3. (Her daddy and her uncle could read at 3)

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It IS ridiculous. However, there is a private school near me that tests the kids to get in. They have to write the whole alphabet in the correct order, and one little boy we know didn't get in because he didn't have good enough handwriting. That said, whether a child can do this at 5 depends more on the child than the training. Kids learn when they're ready.

I sent one of my kids to an academic preschool that drilled them for 3 hours a day and the other to a Christian preschool where they played and learned Bible stories. The one who went to the academic school was ahead when she started kindergarten, but they were at the IDENTICAL reading level by first grade. The one who went to the Christian preschool has been an overall better student. I don't think it has anything to do with the school.

Preschool is not "warehousing," btw. I sent my kids to preschool to get used to other kids, and then, we had playdates with those kids after school.

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Childhood is a journey, not a race.

As a teacher and program director of highly gifted students, I cannot begin to tell you the number of misconceptions there are about highly gifted children. This is one of them! The statistical reality is that giving children an academic "boost" in early childhood doesn't really help them after about 9-10 years old. The socioeconomic factors of development even out at about that time, and students from less advantaged situations have "caught up." This is why the huge majority of gifted education programs either don't formally identify students until after 4th or 5th grade, or they do a comprehensive re-assessment around 4th or 5th grade.

I have yet to have a student who came from one of these "super" preschools in our program. Of the top 50% of the gifted students I serve, about half were cared for in the home, and the other half had "standard" daycare situations. And---for the record, the HUGE majority of parents of highly gifted students have no clue that their child is "off the charts." Why? Incredibly gifted children don't function the way the rest of us do. Many of these kids have little foibles or behavior issues that their parents obsess over. In reality, the kids are so smart that they've learned how to distract their parents with behavior issues while they mentally go into overdrive to figure things out. Yes--gifted kids are master manipulators---but that's another topic.

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The 'mother' who's suing has nothing to worry about. If she's putting that much pressure on a four-year-old to make it into college, the kid will have likely killed him/herself long before the time comes.

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A pre-school that decides your child's future at l9k! What am I reading? If a child wants to learn, he/she will be a success regardless. I taught public school for 30 years and saw this in action.

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Come on, people. It isn't about where you go to school, its about the skills you learn and your SAT scores. IVY league schools are not going to turn down students with nearly perfect SAT scores, 4.0 or higher gpa's and passing scores on multiple AP tests. Let the preschool kids be just that...kids!

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I have to think that there's a lot more to this story that the press is leaving out. $19,000 a year for pre-school is not out of line, especially in Manhattan. I know that's scary, but I live in a fairly low-cost-of-living midwest town and pricing pre-schools for my own daughter is giving me major sticker shock. (We're looking at $200 - $300 per week, and the places are not fancy.) But hasn't everyone heard tales of pre-schools that promise kindergarten readiness, and promises parents that the child child will be reading, writing and developing basic math skills? And then they find out that the kids are all left to run wild all day and that no actual learning takes place? I have. I know several reputable learning centers where friends have worked that have said every day is a matter of survival and that all the management cares about is making money. Perhaps this mom wanted to move her child to a better environment but couldn't afford to pay the tuition of top of what she owed on the contract. That sounds much more plausible to me. Why should she continue paying for a school that was not delivering what it promised? I don't know that I would agree with refunding her money, but at the very least they should void the contract if they were not providing the care and education that she paid for.

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Lawyers NEVER lose, do they??

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Oh, please! A preschool, preparing kids to get into an Ivy League a dozen years down the road? What a crock of overpriced shit. Know why my parents sent me to preschool (and kindergarden)? It wasn't to force me into an Ivy League (I've seen freaking Hah-vard, and I like where I went to undergrad a dozen times better, and I still got into the grad school I wanted after, thank you very much). It wasn't because they were using the schools as day care. It was to learn to better socialize with my peers at a young age. I already knew the sorts of things that are normal to learn in preschool and kindergarden, but in the real world, the idea of a bunch of neighborhood children being able to get together to play a game of whatever often isn't possible. Anyone who expects a preschool to be incredibly academically advanced, and for that to actually benefit their three or four year old, has another thing coming. Clearly, these are the people who buy those stupid systems for teaching an infant how to read before they can even talk.

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If I were going to pay $19K for a pre-school I would be at that school for at least a few hours before I enrolled my child, just seeing what goes on. Didn't she check it out?

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This is crazy? 19K for a 4 yr old to go to school. Come on. This is about braggng rights. It's the "my child got into a better school than yours" game. Just for the record, I sent my first two kids to PreK. The third I kept home and extra year and he just started out going straight to kindergarten. Guess who brings home the best grades? He is top of his class and it didn't cost us 19K to put him there. And even if he wasn't, I would still love him. And I don't care what school you go to as a child, it does not always mean you will be successful. There are plenty of kids from public schools who worked had to land a spot at schools like Harvard. It is their drive that will make them successful in the end. Not their parents.

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Horrifying. Modern Moms push 'em out, dry 'em off then whip 'em into pre-pre-pre K so they can get back to work. Then everybody wonders why we have 18 year old burnouts; they've been in school for 16 years! We don't even require that of Doctors, and they're adults. Horrifying.

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Wow, 19K for preschool, I’m in the wrong business. It does sound like a lot, but I’m sure spending $8 on a combo meal for lunch at some fast food restaurant seems just as whack to citizens of third world countries. I can’t take issue with the price she paid because she obviously had the money to do so, god knows I’d spend some cash frivolously if I had it. The issue I have is, how much time did she spend with her child outside the classroom, or in for that matter? If she was so worried about her child's education and willing to pay $19,000 for it, then she should have been in that class at least once a week, as well as having a print out of the curriculum the school was going to offer her baby. Most of us probably would spend 19K on a car, but before we did that we’d take it for a test drive, something she should’ve done with that school a year prior to her child’s attendance, and to get more specific in the class of the teacher who would educate her daughter. And is her daughter being denied Ivy League already, or did she keep the tag on her lil black dress, wear it out and now wants to return it so she can buy a new pair of shoes?

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History has proven that no matter how much money one throws at education, nobody will learn unless they want to. History is rife with examples of poverty stricken and uneducated families producing children who have excelled and become great, not because a ton of cash was spent buying them the best education, but because they wanted to improve themselves and received the most important support of all - parental involvement.

History is also full of people who had all the advantages of society, but didn't want to learn, so became roaring failures.

You can be a super-mom and pay others to raise your kids, or you can be a regular mom and love your kids be giving them what really counts - your time and involvement. Trying to do both more often than not leads to failure of everything.

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This mom is a total IDIOT!!. I've been a pre-school teacher for many years and it's NOT BABYSITTING!!!!! Alot of what we do is what kindergarten was many years ago. Socialization is a very big aspect for getting ready for school. learning to get along with each other is very BIG!! It's not the same staying home with adults, with mom all the time. All children are teachable and everybody learns their abc's just like they all learn to walk, talk and go potty!!

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As a single mother of five with a degree in Child Developement I would like to point out that teaching children numbers and colors is actually very important and leads to other learning as well. Mixing colors in art teaches children cause and effect, asking them what they think will happen when they mix two colors teaches them to form a hypothesis, mixing the colors is an experiment and seeing the results helps them draw conclusions from their experiment. This type of organic learning is very important and is more to a preschoolers level. Memorization and regurgitation of info does not teach a child how to learn and understand, just recite and if they can only memorize they are helpless when it comes to figuring out something they haven't been spoon fed before hand. Even though I am low income and had to "warehouse" my children in daycare so I could work, my oldest just got accepted to an Ivy League University because I made everything a learning experience and she understands the learning process not just memorization. A strong base is the most important thing in education.

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