The Preschool Race Is No Joke

WILDLY implausible faux news stories appear each April Fool’s Day, some of which are taken seriously. This year’s clear winner was the National Public Radio feature about a preschool’s new requirement that all applicants submit DNA profiles.

As the segment begins, the host Guy Raz is greeted by Rebecca Unsinn, described as headmaster at a school called the Porsafillo Preschool Academy, located in a striking I. M. Pei-designed building in a leafy enclave on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Dr. Unsinn walks Mr. Raz through gleaming computer labs where toddlers master C++. She proudly describes the school’s Mandarin Chinese immersion program.

We are also told that Dr. Unsinn, a pediatric neurologist, was recruited to oversee the school’s new genetic tests, designed to help winnow 12,000 applications for 32 available spots in next year’s class. As she explains, “We now know that simple DNA testing can determine whether a child will end up at Yale or at Yonkers Community College.”

Most societies take at least some steps to curb waste that results from arms races in education and other domains. Consider the practice of kindergarten redshirting — so called because of its resemblance to the practice whereby universities hold athletes out of competition during their freshman year so they’ll be bigger and stronger during their four remaining years of eligibility.

Ambitious parents might consider redshirting their kindergartners, because they would then be older, smarter and more emotionally mature than their classmates. And because school performance is graded on a curve, they would be more likely to win admission to an elite university. But the same option, of course, is available to other parents, and if all took it, no child would perform better in relative terms. We’d just end up with an older crop of kindergarteners.

That’s why parents have good reason to favor the laws in most jurisdictions that take the kindergarten start date out of their hands.

It would obviously be a much more radical step to impose limits on how much parents could spend on private schools. But what if we adopted the Buffett Rule, under which top earners’ tax rates would be no lower than those paid by middle-income families? That would reduce what top earners could bid for the scarce things they want. But because the allocation of elite preschool admissions, penthouses overlooking Central Park and other such prizes is settled by relative bidding, the question of who gets what would be unaffected. So with no real sacrifice, the rule would generate new revenue for reducing deficits and rebuilding tattered infrastructure.

Top earners, meanwhile, will continue to reap the bulk of all income growth, and the preschool admission battle will grow steadily more intense. The only reason that no elite preschool has adopted DNA tests is that no one has figured out how to use them to predict academic achievement. Yet.

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