Bad Parents
We give our kids everything and ask for nothing in return. Is it a shock that they’re clueless and entitled? How a generation of well-intentioned Philadelphians has screwed up its children |
By Tom McGrath
Page 1 of 9
 - Photograph by Jonathan Pushnik
IT IS, I HAVE TO ADMIT, A PRETTY COOL TRICK. On a Thursday morning in midsummer, I’m sitting in the beautifully appointed St. Davids offices of ES: Educational Services. I’m face-to-face with ES founder and president Avery Snyder, a man who holds one of the most exalted positions in all of affluent parenting culture these days: the high-priced SAT tutor. The trick that Avery, an energetic and remarkably youthful-looking man of 60, is showing me: how to get the correct answer on an SAT question — without actually reading the question.
He pulls out a sheet of paper and uses it to cover up the question, then focuses my attention on the multiple-choice answers below it. He explains why if you understand anything about how the SAT really works, you can quickly figure out that the answer here must be D. He flips to the answer key for the test:
Yup, the answer is D.
You are no doubt wondering what Avery knows that allows him to do this, and I would be happy to tell you, except that in the SAT tutoring business this more or less amounts to a trade secret, and Avery has asked me to keep it off the record. However, for the low, low price of $4,990, Avery or a member of the ES team will gladly show the college-bound teen of your choice this and lots of other strategies that will not really make your kid any smarter or better educated, but will nonetheless help him or her give the SAT the ass-whipping it deserves. In fact, Avery is so confident that he offers a guarantee: Your score will go up 300 points or you get four free classes.
Now, on the one hand, it’s easy to see why any parent who can afford it might be willing to pay for ES’s services. Three hundred SAT points can spell the difference between Ivy and non-Ivy, between a prestigious education and a merely stellar one, between — at least the thinking goes — a Truly Extraordinary Life and an Only Remarkable One.
And yet … somehow you can’t help wondering: Doesn’t dropping five large on test tricks violate the spirit, not only of the SAT, but of parenting itself?
Not that that’s stopping many people, since business is booming at ES’s offices around the Philly suburbs. Avery tells me about the mother of a Baldwin School student who rang him up. “She said the girl has to have a 2,400 — she wants only to go to Harvard,” says Avery, who, while benefitting from this mania, clearly finds it disconcerting. “I said, well, there are a lot of great colleges out there. The mother said no, it has to be Harvard.” ES boosted the girl’s score by 200 points — nearly perfect — but the mother wasn’t satisfied and has sent her back for even more instruction.
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