Vol. 84: The trouble with private schools

And the culprits are….

         At dawn, a mother rouses her sleeping son: “Wake up, Tommy! Time for school!”         “I don’t wanna go to school!” her son wails.
“Come on, Tommy. You have to go to school.”
“I don’t wanna.”
“Why not?”
“The teachers all hate me. The kids all hate me. Their parents all hate me.” “Tommy, we’ve been over this many times. You have to go to school.”
“But why, Mommy?”
        “Because, Tommy, you’re the principal.”

         This hoary joke (which please forgive me for repeating) occurred to me earlier this month when the New York Times reported that the leader of “one of New York’s most elite private schools” had quit his job after “an academic year marked by infighting among parents, students, faculty, and alumni over the war in Gaza.” Joe Algrant, who became Fieldston’s head of school just two years ago, has stepped down “to pursue other personal and professional goals and opportunities,” according to the school’s official announcement. Well, at least they didn’t say he wanted to spend more time with his family.

         Fieldston was said to be torn apart this spring by pro-Palestinian student activism, including antisemitic graffiti on buildings. “Parents complained that school administrators did not do enough to bring factions together or to articulate and enforce rules around activism, antisemitism and Islamophobia,” the Times reported— a succinct summary of the turmoil that has lately disrupted not only the Fieldston School but many other private schools in New York City, not to mention elite universities across the U.S.

Radical incubator

         I’ve followed Fieldston’s turbulence from my Philadelphia perch because, as you may know, Fieldston is my alma mater and a place about which I care deeply. During my student days— the conformist Eisenhower/McCarthy ’50s— this remarkable progressive school boldly encouraged us kids to think for ourselves and to question authority (even to disagree with our teachers). That open-minded incubator produced generations of creative minds capable of thinking outside the box, like the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atomic bomb), the medical researcher Douglas Lowy (who found a cure for cervical cancer), incisive journalists (Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, Maggie Haberman and Jill Abramson of the New York Times), the sagacious longtime Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau (the model for the Adam Schiff character in TV’s “Law & Order”) and literally hundreds of other writers, artists, scientists, healers, filmmakers, and activists who dedicated their lives to making the world a better place. (For a more extensive alumni sampling, click here.)

         Who wouldn’t want to attend such an inspiring school or teach there? Why would Joe Algrant— who spent 17 years on Fieldston’s faculty and administration, and whose resignation letter praised Fieldston for “the strongest and most vital mission, purpose, and values of any school I have known”— flee in terror from such a place just 24 months after assuming its top job? What, exactly, has changed since my halcyon days on Fieldston’s campus?

         One obvious answer is the cost. Today, Fieldston’s annual tuition exceeds $65,000— “more than I make in a year,” my professional genealogist friend Jordan Auslander, himself a Fieldston alum, puckishly notes. In my day, Fieldston’s tuition was barely $1,200— the equivalent of perhaps $12,000 today. These days, it’s safe to surmise, Fieldston’s parent pool consists not so much of funky genealogists like Jordan but of investment bankers, asset managers, and Wall Street lawyers— that is, people long on cash and short on humility or patience, who’ve benefitted from the status quo and whose earning power depends on their ability to throw their weight around.

Horror story

         In theory, skyrocketing tuition needn’t hamper a school’s educational product. But it does. When tuition rises to stratospheric levels, parents can be forgiven for perceiving their children’s education as a commodity and thinking of themselves as consumers endowed with the right to tamper with the product, even if they possess no educational credentials whatsoever.

            Not every private school can tell a parental horror story as blatant as that of Philadelphia’s Baldwin School, where in 2007 a real estate developer named Michael Pouls hounded a respected 22-year veteran teacher out of her job by threatening to withdraw his daughter and, by implication, to withhold the multi-million-dollar donation he had pledged toward construction of a new athletic center. As recounted in Philadelphia Magazine, during a classroom confrontation, Sheryl Pouls shouted at the teacher, “You fucking bitch! I want you fired or I’m taking my money and my girls out of this school!” The mere possibility of such antics at other schools does give one pause.

         Missed opportunity

Today’s plague of pushy parents may explain another mystery: Why didn’t Fieldston— not to mention other elite private schools, not to mention elite universities— seize upon the Gaza war as the epitome of a teachable moment? Why didn’t they celebrate the remarkable fact that students care passionately about global issues?

When Marvin Wachman was president of Lincoln University back in the ’60s, he responded to campus civil rights demonstrations by cancelling classes and devoting two days to mass meetings among students, faculty, and administrators. (See my column here.) By the end of those two days, many of the student protesters were begging to return to class. “These crises constituted rewards in themselves,” Wachman later wrote, “in that they provided dramatic learning experiences for me and for the students whom I was charged with educating.” But of course, Wachman didn’t have gazillionaire parents and alumni breathing down his neck to force the students back into their classrooms. I guess that’s one of the benefits of running a predominantly Black institution.

The bottom line

         Fieldston in my day abounded in unorthodox ideas that must have driven some of our parents up a wall. (An annual Christmas sing at a school that was 80% Jewish?) But for the most part, parents tolerated the school’s idiosyncrasies because, well, Fieldston had a good reputation that they aspired to latch onto, and they assumed our teachers knew what they were doing. All of them understood— as today’s private school parents apparently don’t— the unspoken bottom line at good private schools: If you don’t like the way we do things here, send your child elsewhere.

         As I’ve suggested before, there’s an inherent conflict of interest between parenting and teaching. Good parents and good teachers alike instinctively understand that what kids receive from their parents, they can’t get from their teachers, and vice versa.

         But when it comes to transmitting that message, a private school principal— sorry, “head of school”— may be no match for a Wall Street billionaire, just as, say, an Ivy League university president is no match for a grandstanding Congresswoman (looking at you, Elise Stefanik).

A tycoon’s passion

         You may ask: Why do the super-rich seem so fixated these days on education— whether they’re meddling in private school curricula or promoting voucher schemes to replace public schools?

My favorite example, an options trader named Jeff Yass said to be Pennsylvania’s richest resident, is currently deploying his fortune to the cause of school choice. His program’s catchy title— the Yass Prize for Sustainable, Transformational, Outstanding, and Permissionless Education— suggests that Yass could benefit from a few years of transformational and outstanding education himself.

(I too was once a school choice advocate, but I climbed off that bandwagon when confronted with fresh evidence. Click here for the details.)

But I digress. Why are these tycoons obsessed with education? Why don’t these guys— and they do all seem to be guys— invest their billions in, say, criminal justice reform or eradicating global hunger or poverty?

Milton Friedman or Martin Luther?

Jeff Yass recently told Philadelphia Magazine that he once asked his hero, the conservative economist Milton Friedman: “If you had a lot of philanthropic money, what would you do with it?” Friedman, according to Yass, replied: “I would fight for school choice. That’s the fundamental problem with the country. Nothing is more valuable than school choice.”

Did Yass seek a second opinion? Did he research the subject himself? Did he wonder about the wisdom of assuming there’s a single solution to all the country’s problems? Not hardly. “As a gambler,” Yass explained, “I was like, well, I got to ask the guy who has the best opinion. I want to bet with him. So it certainly made sense to me.”
         This man could be a walking poster boy for Martin Luther’s maxim: “Riches are the least worthy gifts which God can give men. Therefore, God commonly gives riches to foolish people, to whom he gives nothing else.”

         But here’s my theory: Once you’ve amassed more money than you know what to do with, you hunger for things money can’t buy, like prestige or immortality. There’s no prestige in poverty or criminal justice reform. But there’s plenty in elite universities and prep schools. Or at least there used to be, before the moneychangers invaded the temple. To those who work in such places, I say: Good luck. And keep your bags packed.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com