Forbes Names Most Expensive Preschools, Including Chicago City Day

Chicago City Day, at about $18k per year, is includes as one of Forbes' most expensive preschools.  "Tuition is $17,750, but there is another $1,000 worth of fees for materials, meals and the like."  It's even worse in NY and DC.  Check it out here.

Comments

[George Schmidt]

The joke is on the parents who are paying all that money. They are shelling out for bragging rights, like buying a twenty dollar cup of coffee at a "top of the line" luxury hotel.

One of the real good news stories in CPS is the expansion and quality of pre-school. Anyone who has ever visited the classrooms -- over time -- has seen how good they are. And this was long before the ongoing expansion of pre-school. The Child Parent Centers were doing this kind of job from Stockton out through the far south side for decades.

And that's in "public" schools for all kids -- not private ones for the richest of the rich.

Of course, the most important schooly things for three- and four- year olds are play, safety and joy.

As long as teachers and parents can keep the worksheet cops out of the pre-school rooms, things will remain sane. But with DIBELS creep now hitting all the way down to kindergarten (which no sane child development person would try to claim makes sense, or pedagogical sense) it's possible the data drive dreaks running CPS will even screw up pre-school.

We do have some "mandatory testing" in preschool. From NCLB. With Head Start having more testing than Pre-K.

Preschool For All has been making many improvements over the past few years.

Head Start still has a ways to go.

The CPC's were nationally studied and have amazing results of about 600 kids who were in them and the "control group." However, they are bare bones now. They cut out all the "goods" in the ways of funding.

The other thing is that the CPS has gotten rid of almost all of the full day programs, so many parents choose to put kids in private daycare because nobody is able to drop their kids off midday or pick them up in the midday. Some Head Starts are full day if parents are working full time (makes sense) and some "collaboration" Head Starts/CPC's are full time as well. One thing that I have noticed is that not all neighborhoods have preschool for all. In the neighborhoods with Head Start only, sometimes parents who are trying to make ends meet and are working full time don't qualify for head start because they are over income by a few hundred dollars or so and there are only so many exceptions that can be made.

The preschool programs are doing the best they can, but there is still room for improvement. Yes, the worksheet police are comming, unfortunately. Unfortunately it is in the wave of new teachers who want to ignore the fact that Early Childhood says "no worksheets" because they are feeling pressure for kids to be able to do this and that in the first few weeks of school due to parent pressure and pressure from the kindergarten teacher. Hopefully they'll learn over time about how to go against these demands put on these babies.

The preschool programs are about as diverse as anything else in CPS. You have your great ones to your ones that get shut down by the board for laking in this or that. Not much is standardized between the three pre-school programs.

Head Start and Preschool For All seem to be getting on better terms with each other, but for the most part there is still a lot of obvious animosity between them. Especially since they have to share a building now.

"Especially since they have to share a building now."

Maybe where you are. Most preschool on the Southwest Side is -

- contracted out to commercial daycare and community groups in basements and strip malls, or

- held on the 'third' shift as most other children are going home.

Nobody on full day.

Barbara Bowman and her deputies are starving these children educationally, just as Duncan and Daley are inciting racial tensions by cramming their older siblings into overcrowded schools and closing others to artifically create overcrowding and increase resentments.

Then they can turn around and blame the children's teachers, and create yet another Blackwater opportunity for the next community group Daley needs to shut up about Duncan's administrative malfeasance.

Head Start does not have a ways to go. They are still recovering from their own stint in the private sector as somebody's payola. Several years before that, CPS hired the city clinics to give hearing and vision testing. The little testing they accomplished was never recorded on the student system.

These outsourcings were chartering clones in their desperate effort to take education out of the hands of professionals in order to take away the last witnesses to the mess they have created.

I personally believe the rush to push IMPACT into production is but the most recent effort to manipulate and mangle student data so that no one on the inside can challenge it.

[George Schmidt]

"...Barbara Bowman and her deputies are starving these children educationally, just as Duncan and Daley are inciting racial tensions by cramming their older siblings into overcrowded schools and closing others to artifically create overcrowding and increase resentments..."

Anyone who is interested in doing a full story on Bowman and the recent guttings of certain pre-school programs, I'm game. As you know, she was out front for the past two years every time Duncan ordered up more cuts, saying they "couldn't afford it." When Duncan's budget lies (the "deficit" that wasn't that he proclaimed from January through the summer of 2006 in order to cut and gut special ed and some pre-school) were exposed, there was no attempt to restore the programs that Specialized Services and Early Childhood had cutted. Instead, they put the dollars -- totalling nearly $100 million -- into Surplus (officially called the "Reserves"). It would have cost half that to restore every special education and early childhood cut Duncan had made the previous two years.

It's also fun to watch Bowman in action at Board of Education meetings. She has so little respect for parents that she's basically reading her way through The New York Times Best Seller List (under the table, of course) when she should be listening to parent complaints and laments. Then, if called up to say something, she just gets up and blathers the usual Duncanian boilerplate, without even introducing herself to the aggrieved teachers, parents, children and (in come cases) principals.

Early Childhood experts and bureaucrats should show some concern for people. "Data Driven Management" data sets and Excel spreadhseets (sometimes accompanied with Power Point) are obscene when used to mendaciously ("We don't have the money" when they really do) screw poor children out of services they should be getting.