An all-too-real progressive parable of ‘privilege hoarding’

WASHINGTON — Nestled on the Front Range of the Rockies, the city of Crystal was a largely upper-middle-class paradise — meaning, of course, impeccably progressive — Coloradans. Then in slithered a serpent in the form of a proposal for a new school, to be called “Crystal Academy,” for “accelerated and exceptional learners.” Suddenly it was paradise lost.

This “deliciously repulsive” story (one reviewer’s scrumptious description) with “Big Little Lies” overtones (the same reviewer) is told in Bruce Holsinger’s new novel “The Gifted School.” It is perfect backto-school reading, especially for parents of students in grades k-12. And it is wonderfully timely, arriving in the aftermath of Operation Varsity Blues — who knew the FBI could be droll? — which was the investigation into a very up-to-date crime wave, the scandalous goings-on among some wealthy parents who were determined to leave no ethical norm unbroken in their conniving to get their children into elite colleges.

In Holsinger’s book, school officials, speaking educationese, promise that as 100,000 children compete for 1,000 spots — the dreaded 1% rears its ugly head — there will be “a visionary, equitable and inclusive admission process.” Four mothers who have been friends forever, but might not be for long, begin becoming rivals in what they regard as a nearly zerosum game, as they plot to game a process that looks alarmingly fair. Their children are embarked on a forced march to demonstrate they are “gifted”: “Advanced math, Chinese, martial arts, flute lessons with the principal player in the Colorado Symphony: by eighth grade Tessa had become a living, breathing benchmark, a proof of concept for the overinvested parenting they all practiced with varying degrees of obliviousness and guilt.”

This is what Holsinger calls “advantage hoarding” and the “delicate ecology of privilege.” Everything is hypercompetitive, even among Crystal’s 11-year-olds, from History Day at school to the travel soccer teams, which involve “a lot of mileage, a lot of Panera” in an Audi Q7 with a “Feel the Bern” bumper sticker, with “all the Patagonia parents huddled by the pitch, cheering on their spawn in socially appropriate ways.”

Because Crystal Academy is to be a magnet for students whose transcripts are clotted with AP (advanced placement) courses, it is definitionally elitist, and consequently an awkward fit for good (and affluent, and credentialed) progressives who are determined to lie and cheat in order to maximize the already considerable advantages of their family cultures. Soon, and inevitably, there is a movement against the new school: “We believe that gifted education should be democratic, egalitarian and nonexclusive.” Holsinger’s “allegedly” is priceless in conjunction with the insistence on gifted education that eschews exclusivity and inequality. It is not easy being an affluent progressive and a scourge of privilege.

Holsinger previously was at the University of Colorado, and he says Crystal is a “reimagined Boulder.” He told The Wall Street Journal that you take “overparented kids, overinvested parents, a cutthroat (college) selection process, and the rest kind of writes itself.”

He has deftly written a satire that arrives when it is needed most — when it is difficult to distinguish from sociology.