Food for thought regarding one of the elephants in the room: socioeconomic status
Great article. A lot of policies at schools to make this more comfortable for everyone do so by hiding it rather than addressing it head on.
Good article. Social class and money (often linked, but not at all the same thing, of course) ought to be more openly discussed. I don’t expect that to happen much in the larger world, but maybe it can in the relatively safe little bubbles of independent schools.
A very informative and thought provoking article! We had some very rich homeschooling people here, but dd never got to know one closely. Now she get to very closely know several at BS, close enough to get to even learn richness problems like inheritance dispute, etc. So far it has been a positively influential experience for her, although I am getting slightly concerned for her growing too ambitious about successful future career.
It seems her friend group talks freely about their family and home. DD has intimidate family information for many of her friends. Talking about family finance doesn’t seem to be a taboo, even though her group is financially rather diverse - few each in FA, middle class, and very rich. After all, get to know diverse people from different region and socioeconomic environment is supposed to be among BS’s many benefits.
The Yale Daily News has a recent column on the topic. It divides kids into “Tahoe Class” and those who don’t know Tahoe is a ski resort.
True diversity would be predicated on economics not color
I’m not sure that’s an either/or…
I wish the article was longer…
Teachers who choose to work for the wealthy and then decide to complain about their customers as if teachers in the public schools don’t have similar problems is tedious.
I have a friend whose daughter became a teacher. She could not get a job in public schools because unions favored the old guard and it was difficult for new grads to break into a rigged system. So the only place that would hire her was a charter school. So she complained about the charter school until she got a job at the public school that shut her out in the first place. Now she is opposed to charter schools.
Your friends’ daughter wouldn’t be the first charter school advocate to change her mind about their impact on education. Diane Ravitch, who used to advocate for both charter schools and high stakes standardized testing, wrote a whole book about why she changed her mind… but that is not the topic of this thread, @WISdad23
I’m not sure my kids’ schools K-12 qualify as “elite,” however I have heard teachers complain about the presence of wealth in the community.
My strongest impression has come from comments about how well-behaved, natural, down to earth, and knowledgeable my kids are by contrast to the “spoiled” (with eye roll) and hyper-insulated ones around them.
Beginning in kindergarten!
Early on, I had observed what many hands-off parents did not–that their nannies were strolling very young ones along while talking on their cellphones, for hours. Then I’d hear from the parents how amazing it was that my kids were talking so early and fluently. (Yes, they do learn from interacting!)
Teaching children of wealth has disadvantages, sure. But it isn’t the children’s fault when they’re very young.
Recently, the Head of a local private upper school expounded on a new study that finds (according to her,) that rich students are more likely to be depressed than middle class or poor ones.
Her talk encouraged the largely advantaged audience to have more empathy for their well-to-do offspring. In my head (where so much dissent lives,) I wondered whether homelessness and hunger were not somehow more depressing than wealth? And more deserving of our empathy, somehow?
–Perhaps psychologists were not studying the poor as closely, since they don’t pay as well.
I went home and suggested to my kids that the study as presented didn’t account for rich kids having more access to psychologists–hence their psychs are over-reporting. Additionally, the rich probably have better insurance for BigPharma’s feel good pills, another inconclusive “proof” of the suffering. Plus some psychologists may want to benefit from the longterm treatment (and billing) of such students’ families by advancing the perception of a widespread, slow-resolving state of mind. (More referrals among good payers.)
–Not saying there’s no such thing as mental illness at hand. Quite the opposite, it’s all around. Just not buying the rich-depressed as a special category neurologically.
To be less provocative, if you work among well-paying complainers, you might develop a bias as to what constitutes a basis for depression, as well as empathy for that particular kind of suffering (how else to continue?,) and have then believe that rich kid suffering is widespread or epidemic.
I personally haven’t seen more depressed wealthy kids than lower or middle class, but I have seen more parasitic opportunism in proximity—by professionals you’d want to trust. Affluent communtities attract a more sophisticated (and expensive) class of opportunist.
As to treatment for the category of affluenza-based depression, I recommend volunteer work among those who need everything. Gratitude and generosity are very good for the mind.
As to teachers who resent their students for the things they have–well, truly affluent-averse people don’t envy ski trips or iphones. Mostly, the excellent teachers my kids have work to capacity precisely because they can concentrate in an environment that is stable and supportive. (Many travel exotically too, on the school’s dime.)
I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and found better teachers in better schools in better neighborhoods. The appalling drawback to that climate is, of course, that nothing is fair in the back-slapping clans of the country club universe.
But very few contexts are fair, and here everything is safer, cleaner, quieter and more orderly. Why wouldn’t you choose that for a teaching environment, if you could?
I’d be frustrated as a teacher not at my rich students, but with the larger system apparently incapable or disinterested in offering a quality education to everyone.
Years ago, a friend was involved in a case in which a girl was being beaten by her father. The family was well off and the girl didn’t want to report it for fear of losing what her wealth gave her. My friend said this was a common scenario when rich kids were being abused. Sad problem.
Some kids might not have the wealth on themselves, but are rather abused by adults who have the wealth, or control of it.
Money controls too much, and decision-making in the courts regarding children. If you want a real shock at the extent to which that is true, look up this thread on CC:
^ @gardenstategal and @SculptorDad
A few days ago The Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece regarding college admissions that nevertheless seems apropos here. The authors argue that the current race-based preference system should be replaced with a class-based preference system:
“Now is the time to make the switch from a “minority” bucket to a “grit” bucket—for applicants of any race who’ve risen above economic adversity—and to be transparent about this change. Whether on the left or right, fair people cannot begrudge a boost in the admissions process for a young person who overcomes poverty and inferior local schools.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/lets-agree-racial-affirmative-action-failed-1509058963
I agree, but I don’t think there is even the slightest chance that this will happen. If such a system were implemented, admissions would be overwhelmed with smart Asian and, to a lesser extent, White students, and Black and Hispanic groups would need separate preference programs. And that of course would take spots away from the truly privileged, and largely White, upper class. Their kids now are well represented in elite admissions, both in college and especially at boarding schools. Remember, the nebulous concept of “holistic” admissions, in which neither the acceptance criteria nor the resulting decisions are ever disclosed in a meaningful way, allows for the admission of a whole lot of average but well-connected applicants.
The effort to take first gen students and students in programs such as questbridge and posse are some of the ways schools try to achieve this. Not to say it’s enough but the idea isn’t entirely unheard of or untried.
I suspect the real challenge isn’t around the academic superstars who manage to achieve in spite of their situations but around the merely good students who needed a better high school situation in order to be truly ready to succeed in college. Admitting students is a start, but they have to be sufficiently prepared as well, and it’s hard to see how that can happen in many schools.
It’s already being done. In addition to @gardenstategal’s mention of Questbridge, being first gen regardless is already a big plus outside of any formalized programs. Socioeconomic background is considered in holistic admissions. It moved away from an automatic bump for URM awhile ago. Admissions committees look at one’s circumstances and educational opportunities when reading apps. This goes across all races. First gen and low income is a big focus at the elite colleges right now.
Many selective schools have fully paid fly-ins and early start and mentoring programs designed to attract these students as well as ensure their success when there.
^ Admissions directors have been lying about “holistic” admissions for literally 100 years now, ever since the practice was first instituted in order to limit the numbers of poor, immigrant Jewish students at the Ivies starting in the 1920s. With regard to admissions of Blacks, Harvard has been caught lying so many times that its former President tried to obfuscate the whole question by writing a book (The Shape of the River, by Derek Bok, et al.) but refusing to release the data set from which its conclusions were drawn. Let me stress that I have no problem with whatever discriminatory practices private elite boarding schools use to ensure the “right” mix; I just wish they would spare us all the sanctimony!
Getting back closer to the topic of class differences, I think a simple requirement of uniforms might go some ways towards ameliorating the apparent socioeconomic differences among students. Uniforms might also help reinforce the message that school should be first and foremost about learning and developing academic abilities. Last, a simple merit-based approach towards scholarship students would help (“I know you are much richer than I am and you know that I am a lot smarter than you are, and with that out of the way let’s get on with our tasks!”). I don’t see the need or desirability of “elite” schools to import merely “good” students who are poor when there are so many poor students out there who can intellectually outclass so much of the full pay student body.
My sentiment exactly. But I understand why they can’t do that since it will make them look bad.
I think the main goal is promoting student body’s diversity for the students, not to help all the smart but poor kids out there. The qualification here is coming from different socio-economic back ground. They only need to be “merely good” enough for academics.
"I think the main goal is promoting student body’s diversity for the students, not to help all the smart but poor kids out there…They only need to be “merely good” enough for academics. "
But @SculptorDad the “merely good” are not lab rats or props to be brought in to make the experience of the full pay students better, are they? Why not prefer the most qualified, the most intelligent of the poor? Obviously, there would be a hierarchy. PEA, Andover, etc. would get “better” scholarship students than schools lower down on the food chain, and so on down the line. As well, each school would have to balance its desire to have smart (whether “merely good” or “exceptional”, etc.), but poor, students against its financial constraints. But I would think the ranks would fill out quite well, and the average ability at all the schools would be raised from its initial reference point of “holistic” admissions.
Well, there’s the rub. What the schools are in fact doing makes eminent economic sense. A fair merit competition - given the obvious attractiveness of the boarding schools - would result in a group of kids at each of the schools that would so far outclass the full pay contingent as to discourage them from applying. This, in fact, was precisely what happened in the 1910s at Columbia University and Horace Mann (an elite NYC day school, then and now): the Jewish students at Columbia, who were from poor, sometimes illiterate parental backgrounds, were so much superior to the private school kids that Horace Mann students stopped applying to Columbia. (Google “Prettyman Report and Horace Mann” for some interesting history.) Incidentally, a desire to exclude the Jewish students, who largely lived in New York City, was the genesis of the “regional diversity” that is now one of the hallmarks of “holistic” admissions.
So, again, I understand what the schools today are doing and salute their right to do so. But spare us the sanctimony that the schools are selecting the “most qualified” or the “brightest” when in fact what they are doing is simply protecting their financial bottom line. Full pay parents will not like having their kids so outclassed, and just as with Columbia 100 years ago, they will stop applying and paying.