The ABCs of preschool

WITH ALL THE heat Rob Reiner has been getting for his universal preschool ballot initiative, I hate to pile on. After all, as a Toyota minivan Democrat and mother of two, I’m in favor of more preschool. Just don’t tell me it’s “universal” until your family joins ours in the vast whirling cosmos of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Given the way that affluent families already eschew L.A. Unified’s totally free education -- forbidding their spawn to get any closer to state-regulated instruction than they would to, well, the bus -- Reiner’s Preschool for All ballot initiative would really mean more preschool for the poor, but with a much nicer name. In the L.A. of 2006, the only true “universal” is a studio.

We’ve seen the dichotomy of public versus private schools -- if you will, the bureaucracy versus the “lattetocracy” -- in our own family’s educational travels. Our eldest’s school is in the first camp, being a Van Nuys magnet that abuts that supposed public school den of horrors known as ... Birmingham High. (Which, never mind that depressing, four-part, front-page L.A. Times series on its dropouts, I still consider a decent school. On March 20, its excellent choir will perform at Disney Hall. So there!)

Our tattered but soulful L.A. Unified school is academically challenging and a veritable Ellis Island (my daughter is the only blond in her class of 22). Kindergarten runs from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. There’s daily homework of reading, adding and printing entire sentences, and sentences.... Frankly, we’re peddling as hard as we can to keep up with the immigrant kids, almost all of whom have had, yes, free preschool, which has been provided by the federal and state governments for years and more recently by our much-maligned school district.

There’s what I call “the Head Start crowd” -- Armenian kids who speak Armenian and Russian and are so adept with pencil and paper that they can practically fill out their own magnet-school applications.

There’s the Latina mom of my daughter’s friend, Precious. She teaches in the Los Angeles Universal Preschool program funded by Reiner’s previous school initiative, Proposition 10. She believes in structure, discipline and homework twice a week ... at age 4. Asians? Don’t get me started! (The Bangladeshi architect mom already has her eye on Balboa Gifted Magnet! Academic Performance Index = 971! Yikes!)

Even some of our non-low-income kids have had free preschool. “How’s that possible?” I asked one mother, amazed. “I don’t know,” she said, throwing her hands up in the air, in apology and confusion. “It was in Arleta.”

Clearly our mistake was starting our preschool search on the south side of the tracks (Ventura Boulevard) in the offices of -- oh, bane of the anxious middle-class parent -- our yuppie pediatrician.

The preschools she recommended were Maggy Haves and the Neighborhood School, names wonderfully reminiscent of farms, chickens and Wallace Stevens’ lone red wheelbarrow in the rain. (Other favorite L.A. preschool names include A School for All Children Great and Small, Little Dolphins by the Sea, Magic Years, the Nurtury and Wagon Wheel.)

Unfortunately for us, like hip restaurants, “recommended” L.A. preschools tend to be notable less for their universality than exclusivity. (Was our application rejected because our daughter didn’t know her ABCs or because our area code was 818?)

We eventually did find a sweet, $400-a-month preschool affiliated with a church. Price-wise, for L.A., it’s not an elite preschool, but it is overwhelmingly Caucasian, middle income and developmental. This means kids may follow a ladybug all morning if they feel like it.

Would Precious’ L.A. Universal Preschool-trained mom approve?

Anthropologist Adrie Kusserow has done a fascinating study comparing preschools in upper-middle-class Manhattan with working-class Queens, which in L.A. terms parallels the differences between, say, Studio City and Panorama City. Perhaps the divide’s not quite as stark as one example Kusserow cites in which a well-meaning, college-educated white teacher soothingly asks her inner-city brown student, “Don’t you want to take your poetry book home?” and the boy says: “Oh, no. If my dad saw this, he would beat me.”

But there are telling differences in educational philosophies. Working-class parents tend to favor discipline, homework and, if need be, drilling. For affluent parents of Little Dolphins, drilling = actual death of the soul.

However much Democrats love the word “universal” (with its refreshing intimations of Europe, the metric system and washed pine furniture), sadly, most politically progressive California parents I know don’t much care for the word “public” (fluorescent lighting, chain-link fence, the Pledge of Allegiance). Their kids eat organic vegetables and make diversity collages in private school to the tune of $15,000 a year.

Their parents’ beef with L.A. Unified? It’s not the great numbers of poor Latino children, oh no. It’s that such English learners must be taught via the (much too structured and creatively suffocating) Open Court literacy program.... And “Hayley is so bright I know she will be bored.”

But I don’t want to be too hard on my own party. Look, at least we have a preschool initiative. Many poor families are still on preschool waiting lists -- their kids deserve a place. And if universal preschool is rigorously standardized, there should be plenty of space in them because, for affluent parents of fragile geniuses, when it comes to this particular free governmental service, it will be, “After you, my dear Alphonse.”

Sure, this divide in cultures calls into question the national parents’ movement that Reiner champions. On his Parents’ Action for Children website, he writes: “Groups as disparate as gun owners and the elderly, lawyers and truck drivers all have the backing of major national organizations.... But what about parents?”

Yet the solution is within his grasp. Even Meathead could shed his blue-state celebrity taint if, come 2015, we see his kids marching, elbow to elbow with ours, straight into Birmingham. High.