News and Reviews
Lie, Cheat, Beg or Sue
Sunday, July 30th, 2006Academy X
By Andrew Trees
Bloomsbury USA; hardcover
Glamorous Disasters
By Eliot Schrefer
Simon & Schuster; hardcover
Jane Austen in Scarsdale;
or Love, Death and the SAT’s
By Paula Marantz Cohen
St. Martin’s Press; hardcover
THE most unpopular teacher in New York City this summer is probably Andrew Trees, a 37-year-old who teaches history at Horace Mann School. Mr. Trees is the author of “Academy X,” a satiric novel about a private school so deeply in the throes of college-admissions hysteria that roughly a third of the students are pretending to have learning disabilities so they can get more time on the SAT’s.
As a publicity stunt, the author adopted the pseudonym so beloved by 19th-century pornographers, “Anonymous,” and he outed himself only shortly before publication, in June, whereupon many with close ties to private schools accused him of being a turncoat. “I think this is the biggest self-righteous, arrogant traitor walking the face of the earth,” Victoria Goldman, a board member of the nearby Riverdale Country School, told The New York Sun. Riverdale is one of several schools now looking into nondisclosure clauses in employee contracts.
In truth, Academy X doesn’t particularly resemble Horace Mann or any other school. All we learn about it is that it has the city’s only indoor croquet court, and that if you have to ask what kind of place it is, then your child would never get in to begin with. And the novel is less a pedagogical exposé, in the tradition of, say, Dickens’s “Hard Times,” than it is the latest example of admissions lit — a new genre about the great rat race of getting your children into the right schools.
Another recent example is “Glamorous Disasters,” about an SAT tutor in New York City who is paid $395 an hour to raise the scores of the spoiled and overprivileged. In this case the author, a Harvard graduate who used to work for a tutoring outfit called Advantage Testing, goes by his own name, Eliot Schrefer, and if he hasn’t yet been vilified as much as Mr. Trees, it’s doubtless because his former clients would just as soon not call attention to themselves.
The parents in this novel, haughty, neglectful, ambitious, are even more vicious and corrupt than those in “Academy X.” One of them even offers the protagonist $80,000 to take the SAT in his son’s place.
In one way or another, in fact, parents behaving badly is the real subject of admissions lit. The children, no matter how lazy, druggy or just plain dumb, turn out to be the hapless victims of rich, predatory parents who treat the education of their offspring as a sort of social blood sport and will do anything — lie, cheat, grovel, sue — to get an advantage. Staggering amounts of money get tossed around as bribe bait, as well as Knicks tickets and promises of sex.
Nor is the struggle confined to getting into college. The most intense competition, to judge from some other novels, takes place over kindergarten slots. For example, in “The Ivy Chronicles” (Viking; 2005), one family toasts their underperforming 5-year-old in a tanning salon and changes her name to WaShaunté in hopes of gaining some diversity points. (The author, Karen Quinn, ran a pre-school admissions-advice service until she burned out from stress.)
Nancy Lieberman’s “Admissions” (Warner Books; 2004), in many ways the best of these novels, benefits from being about a K-8 school, which means that there are two admissions cycles taking place simultaneously, one to cull precocious, well-connected kindergartners and one to move the graduating eighth graders on to Dalton, Brearly or wherever. The key to both processes is the demented, dictatorial headmistress, Ms. Rothchild, and smart parents know that the best way to appease Ms. Rothchild is to subsidize her friend’s cooking school in Provence.
Another recurring motif in admissions lit is, oddly, Jane Austen. She turns up explicitly in Paula Marantz Cohen’s “Jane Austen in Scarsdale; or Love, Death and the SAT’s,” a novel that takes a fairly benign view of the admissions process and is thus the blandest and wimpiest of these books, though it does have a keen ear for what makes a truly bad personal essay: “When I was a baby at my mother’s knee, I did not have goals, aspirations or dreams. Like a puppy, I rolled and tumbled, knowing no reason or purpose for my actions. However, as I grew, I began to aspire more. I began to study and question. In time a dream began to take shape. That dream was to go to Bowdoin (Antioch, Bard, Middlebury, etc.).”
But Austen is also a touchstone in “Academy X,” where the students slog through “Emma” and keep confusing the characters with the actors who played them in the movie, and all the books are propelled by an Austenian subplot, in which the protagonist — the teacher, tutor, guidance counselor, adviser — is lonely and broke and looking for both a mate and a decent income, if not a fortune. You wouldn’t be in the admissions racket, the message seems to be, if you really had a life.
These lovelorn commoners are also stand-ins for the reader, and it’s through their sometimes envious eyes that we get to take part in that always fashionable literary enterprise, marveling at the excesses and abandon of the rich. In a couple of these books there is as much apartment porn (breathless descriptions of Fifth Avenue penthouses and “classic sevens” on Park) as there is porn of the other variety.
We also get to disapprove and to feel superior, of course, secure in the knowledge that even if we could afford to, we would never stoop to brainwashing our pre-schoolers for an assessment test or donating a sum equivalent to the budget of a third-world country just to get our daughters into what “Admissions” calls The Very Brainy Girls’ School.
Readers of these books who don’t happen to live in Manhattan or in Westchester County (which in Ms. Marantz Cohen’s version is only slightly less of an educational hothouse) can take additional pleasure in knowing that they don’t have to put themselves through this particular wringer.
For readers closer to home, fretting over the odds at Spence, say, compared with those at Chapin or Nightingale, the novels work a little like horror stories; by giving vent to our worst nightmares they both excite and reassure us.
At the end of these books, everyone gets in somewhere, even if the parents divorce each other in the process.
—Charles McGrath, New York Times
7/30/2006
Skinny Jeans
Saturday, June 17th, 2006A few weeks ago my best friend, on her way back to Los Angeles from London, via New York, came into town with a mission: to buy skinny jeans. “Everyone in London is wearing them,” she hissed over her plate of ravioli at Fred’s, the ninth floor restaurant in Barneys. “I felt so stupid in my boot cuts.”
So after lunch we took the elevator down one floor and made a beeline for the denim display. My friend plucked half a dozen pairs off the tables and shelves and charged into one of the dressing rooms. A couple of minutes later she emerged and took a long look in the full-length mirror near the entrance of the changing rooms.
“These are horrible,” she whispered, pressing in the sides of her child-bearing hips (she gave birth seven months ago and is still working off the baby weight) and biting back tears.
They may be the hottest thing in designer denim, adopted by the cutting edge a year ago and now filtering down to the rest of the world, but the skinny jean is a complicated real-life proposition.
Unlike the flare and the boot cut, which balance a thicker thigh or wider hip with extra volume at the lower leg, the tapered ankle of the skinny jean only highlights those figure flaws. Even ultra-slim novelist Plum Sykes urges caution. The jeans, she says, “can only be worn by extraordinary British fashion icons with a rock-and-roll attitude. (They) look dreadful on all other women”.
Still, premium denim designers insist the trend is selling big and is here to stay.
Last autumn, Ernest Sewn introduced its skinny tapered-leg jean, called Harlan, and is offering the silhouette in three additional washes. It’s been so successful that for next autumn, Scott Morrison, Earnest Sewn’s president and designer says, the company has two more styles featuring an ankle zip and an even slimmer-leg jean with a higher rise.
Meanwhile, Seven for All Mankind is expanding their selection of tapered jeans with new washes and ankle zips, and Paris-based Notify has developed a two-wayor “bi-stretch” for addedcomfort.
Buyers are bullish on the skinny, too. Jacques Keledjian, chief executive and owner of Intermix, a chain of fashion-forward boutiques in the US, says the 10-inch-rise skinny black jean from J Brand has been “flying off the racks”.
And Barneys women’s denim buyer Grace Kang says the store has sold over 10,000 pairs of skinny jeans since last autumn.
Of course, it makes sense that after years of pushing low-rise and boot-cut, denim manufacturers and retailers would advocate a completely new silhouette to keep people interested - and buying. As Marshal Cohen, chief retail analyst for NPD Group, a US-based market research firm, says: “Designers are offering skinny leg jeans this season for change. Without style change, the consumer has little to motivate them to purchase new.” Cohen also estimates that the skinny jean, because it appeals mainly to “the young and young at heart, with a figure to wear them,” will reach only 16 per cent of customers.
James Shaffer, the designer behind the LA-based Blue Tattoo fashion line, says skinny jeans account for only 20 per cent of his denim production.”I can say from doing trade shows and discussing with stores, there’s an apprehension because it’s a hard fit on a lot of women. You basically have to be long and lean,” says Shaffer.
As Notify’s owner and designer Maurice Ohayon points out: “In the 1950s the slim fits were glamorous and sexy, emphasising the woman’s body. In the 1980s, the skinny fits were linked to the punk attitude. Today, the slim silhouette creates a perfect androgynous look and is linked to a masculine attitude rather than a sexy one.”
According to London-based Jennifer Kersis, the former managing director of fashion line Jasmine di Milo and head of NetJets’s UK arm, she’s spent the last nine months practicallyliving in her drainpipe jeans from H&M, but a few weeks ago decided the silhouette “wasn’t a novelty” and invested in tapered leg pairs from Paige Premium Denim and Imitation of Christ.
Her favourite thing about them? They show off her Alaia ankle boots. “A boot cut hangs over and hides a beautiful shoe, which is a bit of a shame,” observes Kersis.
In fact, choosing the right shoe seems to be the key to wearing the skinny jean well. Boy-shaped types can pull them off with flats, but everyone else is better off pairing them with heels or even more flattering, tucking them into tall boots.
“A curvy girl should wear them with slouchy boots and a long tunic,” says Kang.
Or she could go for a pair of Radcliffe Denim’s skinny stretch jeans in black. UK-based designer Suzy Radcliffe cuts her skinnys straight from the knee so they’re narrow over the calf but not tight around the ankle, avoiding the hip-widening effect.
Plus, says Radcliffe, “with skinny jeans, darker colours are more flattering because they make the leg look much slimmer.”
Variations on the trend aside, Karen Quinn, the author of bestseller The Ivy Chronicles and the soon-to-be-released Wife in the Fast Lane, has her own reason for embracing the skinny jean. “Getting them on and off is a workout in itself.”
—Financial Times
6/17/2006
Is This the ‘Biggest Self-Righteous Arrogant Traitor’ Ever in School?
Friday, May 19th, 2006Students aren’t the only ones working on research projects at some of the city’s elite private schools.
A history teacher at Horace Mann School in Riverdale has used his intimate view of the city’s movers and shakers to pen a novel about a leafy campus in New York City where 17-year olds drive Mercedes cars, take prescription drugs to boost their academic performance, and turn to seduction and plagiarism to guarantee a slot in the Ivy League.
“Academy X” is hitting bookstores this week and some parents are calling its author, Andrew Trees, a regular Benedict Arnold.
“I think this is the biggest self-righteous, arrogant traitor walking the face of the earth,” a member of the board of trustees at the nearby Riverdale Country School, Victoria Goldman, said. “He’s sending up the entire community that he works with, and that takes nerve.”
The city’s private schools - where influential parents battle for everything from better grades for their children to asking federal judges to intervene in disputes - are known to be tight-lipped when it comes to what happens within their halls. The head of school at Horace Mann and several other administrators did not return numerous calls seeking comment yesterday, and some teachers also refused to talk about the book.
On its copyright page, “Academy X” is listed as being in the “Rich People - Fiction” category. Tuition at the school is almost $30,000 a year. Celebrity parents at the school include the state attorney general, Elliot Spitzer, and an entertainment mogul, Sean “Diddy” Combs.
To build some buzz, the author was listed as anonymous on early copies of the book. Mr. Trees’s name was added when Bloomsbury officially released it.
In a pre-emptive strike, Mr. Trees published a letter to the Horace Mann community in the student newspaper last week, alerting it to the imminent release of his novel.
“My goal in writing Academy X is simply to satirize the follies that occur at virtually every elite private - and many public - high schools these days, particularly the insanity that accompanies the college admission process,” he wrote. The protagonist of the novel, John Spencer, is an English teacher who struggles to teach Jane Austen, but is often distracted by the students’ “exposed thongs and butt-skimming skirts.” A high-maintenance parent tries to bully him to boost a grade to A-minus from B-plus, while another sets him up in a rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side.
In an interview yesterday, Mr. Trees, 37, said that in his five years as a history teacher at Horace Mann he noticed a lot of “entertaining things that would make a good story.”
“The book is a novel. It’s not meant to be Horace Mann, but it definitely draws on my experiences here,” he said.
As a graduate of the Deerfield Academy, a boarding school in Massachusetts, Mr. Trees is no stranger to the world of the wealthy. He also received a degree from Princeton and a doctorate in history from the University of Virginia. The onslaught of tell-all books about the children who reside in the city’s wealthiest zip codes and the people who educate them has some schools now talking about asking teachers to sign nondisclosure forms.
“The Nanny Diaries,” which centers on nannies dealing with the city’s wealthy 4-year-olds, kicked off the slew of books. The most recent additions include “Glamorous Disasters,” a novel by a 27-year-old Harvard graduate, Eliot Schrefer, about an Upper East Side SAT tutor who rakes in $395 apiece to boost the scores of 16-year-olds. In “The Ivy Chronicles,” author Karen Quinn takes readers inside the insane world of what parents will do to get their tots into kindergarten.
Mr. Trees called himself an “equal opportunity satirist” who makes fun of parents, teachers, and students. So far, he says that the head of school is laughing along with him. “His reaction has been supportive. I know that he’s concerned about what people will say about it, but he told me that he thought the book was funny,” Mr. Trees said.
If the book generates problems for Horace Mann, Mr. Trees said he might be out of a job. Other private school principals said they couldn’t believe that he would be invited back.
“As far as I know, I’m still coming back to teach,” Mr. Trees said. “To be honest about it, clearly not everybody at school is happy about the book. I’m hopeful that once the book comes out and people read it, it will be fine.”
In the meantime he has at least a few supporters. “Some parents are fulfilling a fantasy life through their children,” a parent at Horace Mann who asked not to be identified said about the book release. “Some parents are embarrassingly over-involved and become stereotypes of themselves. So many of them are drooping with money and want everybody to know it.”
—Deborah Kolben, The New York Sun
5/19/2006
Baby Shall Enroll: Mommy Knows
Thursday, May 11th, 2006When Tracy Geller Doyle gave birth to her son almost three years ago, she made two phone calls, one to her temple to ask that her son’s name be put on the nursery school waiting list, and one to Free to Be Under Three, a language-building mommy-and-me class on the Upper East Side.
“I literally called from the hospital bed to put his name on the wait list,” Mrs. Doyle recalled. “If you want to get into Free to Be, you have to do it right away.”
As if dressing their babies in $90 designer jeans and ensconcing them in $700 strollers wasn’t enough, upper-middle-class parents in Manhattan are now making sure their infants and toddlers are enrolled in the right play group.
Of a different breed than classes at the local Y.M.C.A., these programs can cost upward of $500 for a series of lessons, say, in music, swimming or art and are sending parents into competition mode well before the typical preschool scramble.
The increased jockeying for popular programs, some with monthslong waiting lists, is fueled by word of mouth, as one mother tells another how much her son loved learning his ABC’s to disco music. Some classes have acquired the reputation among parents—exaggerated, it seems—of being feeder programs to preschools that are feeder programs to private schools.
Parents often feel lucky just to get into some of these playgroups. Earlier this year, Nanne Puritz Allecia, who lives on the Upper East Side, waited by the phone to enroll her son in a class for 6-month-olds at Little Maestros, a popular music program with nine locations around the city. One of the program’s most impressive features is a live adult band at every class, complete with five vocalists, a drummer, guitarist, piano player and sometimes a saxophonist.
Ms. Allecia called on enrollment day precisely at 8 a.m. and was shocked to learn her son would be filling one of the last two spots. “This was sight unseen,” she said. “I didn’t know anything about the class, I just knew about the hype.” Enrichment classes have become more competitive at a time when the number of young children in the city is increasing. According to census estimates, the number of children under 5 in Manhattan rose by more than 25 percent between 2000 and 2004, after years of decline.
“It’s become a craze in the city to get into a mommy-and-me class,” said Catherine Shepard, the mother of a 3-year-old and an 11-month-old. Her boys have taken gym and art classes and have recently learned about music with stuffed animals at the Diller-Quaile School of Music on East 95th Street, where the cost of a yearlong program ranges from $1,290 to $5,745.
“I’ve been to parties or lunches with people while they’re pregnant and they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to sign up for this or that,’ ” Mrs. Shepard said. “When I grew up in Manhattan, you went to the park and on play dates and that was that.”
The obsession with playgroups is relatively recent, child experts say.
“Basically, all of a sudden you can’t stay at home with the baby,” said Dr. Michel Cohen, the founder of TriBeCa Pediatrics. “That’s the new trend.” Dr. Cohen, who wrote “The New Basics: A-Z Baby & Child Care for the Modern Parent” (HarperCollins, 2004), said enrichment classes don’t necessarily make a difference to a child’s development. “The child is often oblivious to what’s going on,” he said. The biggest beneficiaries might be the stay-at-home parents, especially in the winter, when they can feel most isolated.
Parents say they like classes because they provide socializing for both themselves and their youngsters. Some say they sign up because they want to give their child every opportunity to flourish, and they fear that without the classes, their youngster might be at a disadvantage.
“I want my child to have any edge another child has,” said Andrew San Marco, whose 3-year-old daughter takes four classes a week at a cost of $6,000 a year. He said the Little Maestros playgroup, has enhanced her vocabulary.
“She’s very well rounded,” he said.
He also said he believed that her classes had helped her gain admission to the private preschool on the Upper East Side she now attends. But Karen Quinn, a former preschool and kindergarten admissions adviser who wrote the novel “The Ivy Chronicles,” said that although schools like to see that a child “hasn’t been sitting at home watching ‘Barney’ all day,” they don’t care whether the child has been enrolled in a playgroup that has “a degree of cachet” or a class at a place like Gymboree. Some parents choose a particular playgroup because they have their eye on a preschool connected to it. One woman, who spoke anonymously to avoid offending anyone at the school, enrolled her child in a class at a Park Avenue synagogue and said her child was later accepted into the nursery school there.
“I was told by friends that it’s the best way to increase your chances,” she said. “But when you join up they tell you being in this class is not going to help you get in.”
Whatever the parents’ motivation, enrollment in many playgroups is swelling. Glenn Pepper, who runs Take Me to the Water, a swim program at 22 private pools across Manhattan, said he adds staff members to handle calls on the first day of enrollment for his $300 spring sessions for babies. “We’ll book about 1,000 spots in the first seven or eight hours,” Mr. Pepper said.
Marni Konner, who founded Little Maestros four years ago, said enrollment had grown to 115 classes of up to 20 children each, from 7 classes of about 10 children each. Tuition is $360 to $680 a session, depending on length. “We get about 50 calls each day from people we’ve never heard from wanting to put their kids on the wait list or mailing list,” she said. Some parents, she added, pay for a summer session even if they don’t plan to attend, so they can retain priority registration in the fall.
Mr. Pepper said irate parents have threatened to picket because they didn’t get into the class they wanted. Ms. Konner said she and her staff members regularly console crying parents and have been given baskets of gourmet food or luxury gift certificates by hopeful — or grateful — families.
Joe Robertson, who runs the ever-popular Free to Be Under Three playgroup at All Souls Church on the Upper East Side (tuition: $425 to $575 for 12 classes ), said he gets gift offers from parents trying to move children up the waiting list. “We once had a woman who was sure we needed a grand piano for our program,” he said. “I said, ‘Well, thank you, but it’s first come first served. Even my godson had to wait.’ ”
Sometimes Mr. Robertson talks mothers out of enrolling a child at all. “We’ll call them with a spot that’s opened up and they can’t do it because every single day they have two or three things. I tell them, ‘I don’t think you need another class.’ ”
Still, some parents won’t be dissuaded. Mrs. Doyle, who had her son wait-listed from the maternity ward, said she had second thoughts about his being in three classes at just one year old. But she did it anyway.
“My husband thought it was way too much, my mother thought it was way too much,” she said. She now spends $5,000 to $10,000 a year on mommy-and-me programs for her son, who is now 2½, she said. “I think it’s ridiculous, but at the same time I’d do anything for my kid.”
—Tatiana Boncompagni, New York Times
5/11/2006
Tutoring Through The Terrible 2’s
Tuesday, May 9th, 2006TRIBECA-based tutor Karen Quinn began to suspect that her job was far too stressful—for her as well as her clientele—the day that one of her students blew a crucial admissions interview. “He pooped his Pampers,” she says. “The parents were beside themselves! They didn’t know what to do. They pretended it was the little girl standing next to him.” Alas, it didn’t work: “These nursery schools want the kids potty trained, and the child did not get in,” Quinn says. “He blew it with the poop.”
Until she quit in 2003—after just three years—Quinn co-owned and operated a private tutoring service for toddlers whose parents were desperately angling to get them into one of the city’s “Baby Ivys,” those nursery and pre-Ks that are believed to be pipelines to the best private schools. (She turned her experiences into a bestselling book called “The Ivy Chronicles.”)
Quinn—who was formerly a marketer at American Express (her business partner was an educational social worker)—saw 20 to 30 kids a year and charged a $2,500 flat fee. Most of the time, she says, she was just counseling the parents, since “there’s nothing you can do with 11/2-year-olds, really.”
So Quinn learned how to gingerly handle the most demanding of parents: “I had one father who hired an acting coach to work with his child because he thought he had a ‘blah’ personality. He was 4. He wanted the kid to sparkle.” Another 4-year-old faked a heart attack in the middle of a test: “I think he sucked up all the stress his parents had over it,” Quinn says. Still, she maintains that most parents were “nice, normal people” who just lost perspective.
Like one of Quinn’s former clients, a native New Yorker who was shocked by how competitive she found herself when it came to her only daughter’s preschool education. “What really got me going—we didn’t get into our own temple’s preschool!” she says, still indignant. “We were friendly with the cantor and the rabbi, and they ran a very prestigious preschool. I thought it was a slam-dunk.”
Though her husband “didn’t buy into it,” she took her daughter to Quinn. “We were working on her math skills, her life skills.” Ultimately, it made no difference: her daughter’s score on the ERB—the test little private-school aspirants must take—didn’t spike.
“These parents are coming from a good place, the ‘nothing-but-the-best-for-my-kids’ place, but it’s a cultural sickness,” says the Bridge Coaching Institute’s Ellen McGrath. “It’s so destructive. What you’re teaching your kid is that they’re not good enough, that status and power are the most important things. And you’re setting up other people to control and manipulate them.”
Quinn herself quit after one of her charges threw an “age-appropriate” temper tantrum. “She held up her hands and yelled, ‘Stop! Stop! I’m only 4!’ And then I thought, ‘I don’t think this is what I want to keep doing.’ ”
—Maureen Callahan, New York Post
5/9/2006