Alum Writer Reflects on his Prep for Prep Journey in The New Yorker

“I knew how radically these efforts might change one’s life: my wife and most of my best friends are Prep alums; much of what I have that is good I can trace back to the program.”
A staff writer for The New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham (XIX/Horace Mann '02, Hunter '14) reflects on his journey in “Test Case”, printed in the magazine’s March 9, 2020 issue. He weaves his personal and professional experiences at the program with an interrogation of New York’s education system and its complicated history with equity and access. Below is an excerpt.

“[Gary] Simons knew that there were bright but understimulated kids all over the city. Maybe, he thought, he could place more of them at schools worthy of their talents… In 1978, he secured funds from Columbia and from a Sears in the Bronx, hired a few teachers, and got space for classes at the Trinity School, on the Upper West Side.

I was accepted by Prep in the spring of 1996, at the age of eleven, and my life has, in many ways, ordered itself around this early and somewhat arbitrary triumph: when I was a kid, I did well on a test.

The kids I met at Prep were bright and hyperverbal; even the ostensibly cool among them had an obvious nerdiness that they had stopped hiding now that they were away from their normal schools...We were a hundred or so of a kind, all humming with the seductive feeling of having been called out from a crowd. Grouped into small units of about ten, and placed under the charge of high-school-age and college-age advisers who’d gone through the program before us, we quickly developed fellow-feeling. 

Two decades later, on a July afternoon, I visited Trinity again… I peeked in on a second-summer literature class, where students were talking about Odysseus... The teacher wanted to know what the students thought about his character---what it meant when he asked for and accepted help, and whether his virtues in any way mitigated his obvious, trip-extending flaws. Kids piped up one by one, each adding to the class’s group portrait of the wave-tossed, homesick man. I recognized the approach: Prep’s teachers often use literature to teach something akin to ethics, and to illustrate the values that might be useful in succeeding at, say a challenging new school.

I saw love and care reflected by each detail in the room: the bright backpacks, the pressed clothes, the manners and the syntax that had been hammered into place by parents anxious about how their children might be seen in the world…[T]hey had noticed something amiss in the system that was supposed to steward their kids, and they had made a bid for control. I knew how radically these efforts might change one’s life: my wife and most of my best friends are Prep alums; much of what I have that is good I can trace back to the program. The change isn’t only personal. No matter the context, certain privileges accompany being thought smart: teachers kindle your ego; people listen when you talk. And, at a mostly white private school, in a society eager for signs of success, each plucked-out black or brown kid carries an unspoken message. With every new way of seeing comes, subtly, a new way to be seen. 

We are all embedded within systems, but each life—each child—is an unrepeatable anecdote. According to the adults I knew when I was a kid, the worst thing in the world was to be a “statistic,” subsumed into a mass of low expectations and bad outcomes determined by color and class and sustained by a bureaucracy that was, at best, inept and, at worst, intractably racist. Education, then, was triage; escape was a higher-order concern than reform.

Prep’s current chief executive is Aileen Hefferren, who was the program’s operations director and, later, its fund-raising chief before succeeding Simons, in 2002. I asked Hefferren whether Prep, by its nature, helps to keep broader inequalities intact. “We’re going to help create principals, superintendents, education commissioners--people who are going to really change that system,” she said."

Read the full New Yorker article on their website.
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