This Preschooler Will Never Make it Into the Ivy League

While we don’t disagree that some schools in this country are underperforming and doing a disservice to our children, this story takes it a bit too far.

New York City schools are notorious for their competitiveness among the city’s upper crust. The competition heats up for parents as early as nursery school, where some will go to extreme lengths to get their kids into a good school.  That’s why it may not have seemed all that odd to Manhattanites when one of their own sued a $19,000-a-year preschool her daughter attended, “arguing that the program failed to adequately prepare her daughter for the test required to enter New York City’s hypercompetitive private school system.”

The WSJ Law Blog reported that the woman claimed that the preschool did not fulfill its commitment to prepare her 4-year-old daughter for the E.R.B., a standardized intelligence used by independent schools.

In the suit, the perturbed mom said, “The school proved to be not a school at all, but just one big playroom.”  Also included in her complaint, the plaintiff made the correlation between preschool and Ivy League schools, including quotes from news articles that support her claim. One said, “It is no secret that getting a child into the Ivy League starts in nursery school.”

While $19,000 is no small sum for preschool, we’re not sure we’d have much luck finding a preschool in this country that didn’t resemble a play room.