Book Review: The Kindergarten Wars by Alan Eisenstock

Read and reviewed for armchair interviews

When you are looking into prospective schools for your children, do you know what sort of questions that you need to ask yours?

Do you know that your answers on the application to questions like “where did you go to college?” may be one of the most important answers you can give. Yes, to get your child into kindergarten.

In these days of public schools getting less and less funding, more parents are turning to private schools to educate their children. Combine that with the fact that it is becoming more and more fixed in people’s minds that in order to get a coveted education at a prestigious university, it helps to have attended the right schools as a child. Also, there are the other facts like more children entering school, and that siblings get first picks at class openings. Competition to get one of the few openings at a private school can be fierce as hundreds of parents compete for the prize of having their child be one of the elite that made it into the class.

Alan Eisenstock has written a narrative book that follows four families through the process of looking at choosing, and applying to enroll their child into the kindergarten of their choice. Each prospective family takes us through the process of visiting schools, applying to them, going through the interview process, and finally the waiting to hear back from the schools as to whether or not their child has gotten one of those few coveted openings. Alan Eisenstock has traveled. The country interviewing the heads of many private schools, he has followed and interviewed many families about the processes and questions that they debt with. His book follows fictional families in a city that could be any big city in the United States. However, he brings us the readers all of the knowledge that he has gleaned from his research to try and answer the one question that parents in the same situations as his families all have:

“How do you get in?”

ISBN: 044657774X
ISBN-13: 9780446577748
Publisher: Warner Books, Incorporated
Publication Date: September 18, 2006
Binding: Hardcover