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

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.

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.

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.