Education in this country is not a level playing field.  It's an avalanche.  The hardest working kids don't always get their just rewards.  The best and brightest often never get a chance or opportunity to shine.  The cold hard truth is that if you come from certain families with certain amounts of wealth, then you will be socially promoted through the system and get into the best schools even if you are below average talent wise.  One of the most telling paragraphs of the New York Times article is this:

Not every bank executive has school-age children, but for those who do, offspring can be expensive. In addition to paying tuition, “You’re not going to get through private school without tutoring a kid,” said Sandy Bass, the editor of Private School Insider, a newsletter that covers private schools in the New York City area. One hour of tutoring once a week is $125. “That’s the low end,” she said. “The higher end is 150, 175.” SAT tutors are about $250 an hour. Total cost for 30 weeks of regular tutoring: $3,750.

I bolded my favorite part because it points out how these kids could NEVER make it on their own without the financial resources to cover up for their academic inadequacies.  Put them in a public school from kindergarten that spends the same as every other child in the room and these kids as a whole will turn out very average with most either not graduating high school or ending up in community college.

These same rich kids who have the $32,000 a year spent on their private school per year plus several thousand dollars a year more in tutors and other academic related opportunities (vacations, etc....) have about a $25,000 a year advantage over the average American child.  Multiply that by 13 years of schooling and the average 18 year old kid from these "privileged' families" have a $325,000 head start over the average kid.  However, despite this $325,000 head start, many average kids manage to stay even with them academically.  (And yet still the rich snob will argue that he or she deserves that spot at the elite college and not the other kid who busted his or her ass in order to catch up.)

The bottom line is that money buys good education.  These parents wouldn't spend $32,000 a year at the Dalton school if it didn't.  They wouldn't move into the most opulent of neighborhoods if it didn't. (And I taught in perhaps the best of those NY neighborhoods for 5 years as well as having worked in two of the worst run schools in NYC that you could ever imagine. (Simply imagine the worst and that's for starters).

So take the kids out of the Dalton school or help invest in quality public schools where all children may have about $20,000 a year spent on them.  We'll fix all our schools.  Bye bye Dalton.  Learn to live on "only" $500,000 a year.