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Home » Exercise Programs » Prep for Prep and the Fault Lines in New Yorks Schools – The New Yorker

Ed Boland worked in Yales admissions office before becoming Preps head of external affairs. (He left Prep in 2018.) He first heard about Prep, he told me, during the admissions season of 1989. Everybody had a vague sense of what a prospective Yale student looked like, he said. Theyve got grades like this, and scores like this, and attended a summer camp in Maine with a Native American name, and worked at a soup kitchen in France, and had internships at their fathers bank, he said. These experiences are how we have shaped our leadership class for a very long time. He went on, But, on this particular afternoon in 89, there was this whole crop of kids who had the same kind of Park Avenue pedigree, but with outer-borough addresses. This was not, I hate to say it, your typical scholarship kid. These kids were every bit as strong, and every bit as credentialledand Im not just talking grades and scores. The whole package was very Park Avenue. Prep had helped its students not only do well at demanding schools but also signify a kind of social standing. Prep for Prep is like a stimulus package for an individual, Jack told me. My friends often joke that, instead of a rich parent or a working social safety net, we had Prep.

In 2002, I left New York City for Vermont, to attend Middlebury. There, I learned what a Wasp was. I met kids who had gone to East Coast boarding schools and their analogues in the Midwest and San Francisco. They wore Patagonia fleeces and drank entire glasses of milk at meals. They carried Nalgenes full of water which never seemed to empty. They were friendlier than I knew what to do with.

I also met black kids from other statesNorth Carolina, Washington, Massachusettswho belonged to the suburban middle class. We couldnt read one another: they came from families richer than mine, but my education had been tonier. Many of the black Middlebury students who came from New York had attended segregated public high schools in Harlem and the outer boroughs. A few had applied to Middlebury directly, but most had come through programs like the Posse Foundation. (Equality, I was learning, depends so much on mediation, at every step along the way.) These other New Yorkers mostly seemed smarter than I was, but they had not spent the previous several years being initiated into upper-crust education and its folkways. In my early days on campus, I was told more than once, by basically nice white classmates, how much different my speaking voice was from those of the other kids from New York theyd met. What this meant, I knew, was that I sounded, to their ears, sort of white, and that the others didnt.

The academic work wasnt any harder than it had been at Horace Mann, but, by my sophomore year, something in my approach to it had unscrewed itself, fallen loose. I was still diligent about artsinging and doing my best in plays and beginning, tentatively, to writebut, that spring, I stopped going to class, and let late essays pile up. After a flunked semester, I was sent home to New York for a probationary term: I would take classes at Hunter College, part of the City University system; if I earned a B average, I could return to Middlebury. I went home, got the Bs, and headed back north. Then I found out mid-semester that I was going to be a father, and I promptly flunked out again.

Twenty years old, frazzled, living with my mother, and in terrifying need of a job, I landed a low-level position at a hospital. On the day I was supposed to start, I couldnt will myself to go. Maybe I was feeling squeamish about the blood and shit that my interviewer, a kind-looking black woman, had taken pains to inform me, in a dont-act-surprised-when-you-show-up tone of voice, would be a constant part of the job. Or perhaps it was the way that shed said, with something like suspicion, but also with something like concern, Do you think youre maybe overqualified? Im surprised you want this job. As if, really, she meant to say, It looks like youre on a much different path from this one. Keep going.

My daughter was born in the fall of 2005, when I shouldve been a college senior. I got another job interview, at a well-known education nonprofit in Harlem. The interviewer was tall and heavyset and wore a T-shirt bearing the nonprofits name in bright letters. As he looked at my rsum, he dragged his eyebrow upward, squinching his forehead into folds. In the summers between school years at Middlebury, Id worked as a teaching assistant at Prep. Im sure that was really nice, he said. Lotta smart kids. I knew where this was headed. But, you know, real classroomsclassrooms like oursarent really like that. Have you ever broken up a fight? Had a kid curse at you?

It is an odd feeling to watch yourself be seenor, worse, read. I was being interpreted, reasonably but not totally accurately, according to the schools Id gone to and the kinds of jobs Id had. I didnt feel like a member of the class to which my education said I was someday supposed to belong. I felt like what I was: young, black, jobless, an unmarried father. I wanted to tell those interviewers that I was afraid.

Then Prep stepped back into my life. Luck. A stimulus package. I got a job at the programs headquarters, a brownstone on West Seventy-first Street, shuffling papers in the basement. The job required focus, bureaucratic speed, and an ability to communicate regularly and clearly with a Prep administrator whom Id known since I was a kid. I was not good at this job. Piles of paper turned my desk into a model skyline. Information went unfiled, spreadsheets unfilled. Whatever Id learned at school, it hadnt been this.

So Prep recommended me as a tutor for the teen-age son of a black investment banker who was on Preps board of directors. The banker paid me directly, by the hour, and I sent him occasional e-mail updates on his sons progress. We read plays and short stories and articles from the sports pages, and ran through long sets of simple algebra. The kid didnt like to concentrate; I could relate. One day, I got a call from his stepmother, who was from Chicago. She was supporting a young Illinois senator who was preparing to run for President. His campaign was setting up a fund-raising office in New York, and theyd need an assistant. I knew that I was stumbling into another unmerited adventure. Without having finished college, I rode the first Obama campaign all the way to Washington, D.C., where I worked at the Democratic National Committee, raising money, and then at the White House, where I helped recruit minor functionaries to work at Cabinet agencies. On Friday evenings, Id throw clothes into a duffel and catch a BoltBus home to hang out with my daughterand to spend most of each Saturday on the Upper East Side, pecking away at a degree from Hunter College.

I had run up student-loan debt at Middlebury, and I was paying my way through Hunter credit by credit, up front and in cash. Some semesters, out of fatigue or because I was flat broke, I gave up school entirely. Once or twice, I convinced myself that I should quit, that Id made a fine beginning for myselfunreasonably fine, given the circumstancesas a college dropout. But something about the difficulty of this arrangement, and its maddening slowness, helped me focus. At Hunter, what I learned, I learned well, and in a hungry way I hadnt really experienced since high school. It was the first time since fifth grade that Id attended a public school. I wasnt advancing anyones notion of diversity. My classmates were New Yorkers, and therefore from everywhere. Everybody had at least one job, and lots of them had two or three. Nobody strolled across a quad to classHunter has no grassand everybody was always on the train. Many of my teachers were adjuncts, shuttling between one city campus and another; they managed, mostly, to project total sincerity about the subjects at hand. Nobody complained when, lacking a babysitter, I sometimes brought my kid to class. Nothing depended on my presence. I didnt signify.

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Prep for Prep and the Fault Lines in New Yorks Schools - The New Yorker

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Home » Exercise Programs » Prep for Prep and the Fault Lines in New Yorks Schools – The New Yorker