Comparative literature

How far are you willing to go to be on top of the pile?

Recently, I was working on a client project about analyst stock ratings, and that brought up one of the most ridiculous scandals of the early aughts. Investment banks played fast and loose with regulation during the dot com boom, and one common practice was to trade stock ratings for investment banking or other business. It was an open secret, but it was wrong.

The case that finally got the SEC and the NASD (now known as FINRA) to act was an analyst at a big-name bank, part of a bigger financial conglomerate, who assigned a buy rating to a telecom company so that the financial conglomerate’s CEO, who also served on the board of directors of the telecom company, would make a call and give a donation to the get the analyst’s twins into a fancy preschool.

This actually happened!

The analyst and his children were in the same age cohort as the parents in the Varsity Blues scandal, who found ways to pay to get their kids into the “right” colleges. It’s the same age cohort that my kid and I am in, too.

I think schools matter, and a good preschool is so valuable. Personally, nursery school was my favorite of the 20 or so years that I spent in school. We got to paint and do crafts, climb on the play equipment, and listen to stories. How fun is that? We all should do more painting, climbing, and listening to stories!

At the same time, though, I know that the quality of school matters the most to the kids who have the fewest resources at home. Those kids don’t have parents who can work their connections and compromise their ethics to get their kids into “good” preschools.

We lived in San Francisco when our son was born, and the school admissions culture there had a similar hypercompetitive vibe as New York did. I suspect it’s only gotten worse. One of the many reasons that we moved is that I didn’t want everything in my life to be a bidding war. I will never be the person with the most money or the most connections, and that’s fine.

I am allergic to hypercompetitive parenting, and I was able to structure my life to avoid it. In a city like Chicago, with a lot of public school choice and a huge network of private and religious schools, the kids in our neighborhood went to different schools. It was nice, because it meant that what happened at school stayed at school, and we could socialize with adults without every conversation devolving into school politics. Some conversations went that way, though, especially because the Chicago high school admissions process is ridiculous and stressful. I admit it. I’m guilty.

Of course, much of the competitive parenting is driven by new parent insecurities. As kids get older, and if more children arrive, it starts to become clear how much kids are their own people and how much is out of a parent’s control.

Don’t get me wrong: parents matter, and schools matter. But children are their own people with free will. They eventually make their own decisions about how to live their lives. It’s fun to see the different paths people take to find what works for them in this world.

Also: my kid is the only person I would kill for and the only person I would die for, but I wouldn’t sell myself out to get him into fancy school.

In too many American circles, a child’s school is a proxy for the parents’ status, which doesn’t seem fair to the children. Public schools signal where the parents can afford to live, and private schools signal a combination of family income and background. (For the record, I have never attended a public school, my husband has never attended a private school, and our kid has attended a mix of both.)

One of the many joys of having kids go grow up is moving beyond the angst of school performance, admissions testing, and having your kid be your social proxy.

I’m going to write more about this next week, because I just finished Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s excellent Long Island Compromise (Amazon affiliate link.) If you’re looking for a good read to get you through yet another tornado warning, check it out.

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And now, speaking of the early aughts, here’s a great song from 2000 by The New Pornographers, a Vancouver band.