Fine Dining, Dead Poets, and the Demise of Public Education

How durably a high school student builds functional knowledge from schoolwork depends upon motivation. When marathoners hit 'the wall' at mile twenty, when glycogen stores deplete and metabolism desperately taps fat reserves, persistence means continuing to run even though every neural impulse screams stop. Your amygdala is throwing knives at your executive function.

Many elite prep schools eschew AP classes entirely, considering them training wheels for college preparation. Like a marathon, the path to college demands persistence over pleasure. While all students face the same 26.2 miles to graduation, training conditions vary dramatically. Some students train on climate-controlled indoor tracks with personal Ivy-pedigreed coaches and artisanal protein shakes; others dodge potholes and unleashed pit bulls in their dollar-store sneakers, hoping the streetlights stay on for their evening run.

“Most of the action seems to be before kids get to kindergarten. If you can get them to kindergarten on a more even footing, there is a much better chance that they are going to stay on that more even footing as they progress through school.” Reardon (2016)

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If AP classes aren't challenging enough for the elite, why not? The answer lies not in the curriculum itself, but in the in the vast disparity of human and material resources available to teach it. The achievement gap is a euphemism for a resource gap. Conceiving of achievement as the outcome of individual merit in a meritocracy is like comparing harvests between farmers with irrigation systems and those praying for rain.

In AP Literature, students march smartly through their anthology's Greatest Hits: one week for "The Yellow Wallpaper," two for Hamlet, a quick tour of Emily Dickinson. This checkbox approach reflects systematic educational inequity: While well-funded public schools offer 25:1 class ratios and adequate technology, they still face standardized test pressures and limited epistemic support: no JSTOR subscriptions for literary criticism, no university archives for primary sources, no research librarians to guide scholarly inquiry, no budget for visiting literature scholars. Meanwhile, high-poverty districts struggle with 35+ students per class, obsolete materials, and skeletal support staff—a needed reminder that educational resources cascade downward from elite private to affluent public to struggling public schools.

If AP classes aren’t challenging enough for the elite, why not? In AP Literature, students march through their anthology's Greatest Hits: one week for "The Yellow Wallpaper," two for Hamlet, a quick tour of Emily Dickinson. This chart is excerpted from the College Board website:

Meanwhile, across town, students spend a semester unraveling a single chapter of Ulysses, tracing Joyce's Dublin through historical maps, debating Aristotelian references, and reading critical theory that most students won't see until graduate school. AP students write practice essays analyzing tone and theme under timed conditions; their privileged peers crosswalk Camus with Kierkegaard, writing philosophical treatises on absurdism in Kafka, and conducting original research in university archives. In the ether of the elite, the road to college is not a marathon, according to one high-class consultant for the Ivy League infant:

“The path to college is like a fine dining experience. There are a dizzying array of delicious courses available (test prep, college visits, deciding a major, and more). College Planners of America knows ‘eat-and-run’ or ‘buffet-style’ college consulting just leaves families with a bad taste in their mouth. You and your family deserve a long-term, five-star partnership that answers your every question and directs you on the most efficient and effective path to college.”

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The term "opportunity hoarding" aptly captures how educational advantages compound mile by mile across the K-12 marathon. This practice, where privileged groups monopolize and protect academic resources while framing the resulting achievements as meritocratic, reveals itself in the language of college preparation corporations. When companies like College Planners of America market education as a "fine dining experience" with "five-star partnerships," they're not just selling counseling services. They're architects of educational stratification.

Elite prep schools operate from a remarkably similar playbook as near as I can tell: 12-15 students per class, PhD-credentialed teachers, research libraries, university partnerships, and semester-long deep dives into single authors or theories. Their differences amount to nuance—whether Joyce scholars visit in person or via Zoom, whether students access rare manuscripts through Harvard's archives or Yale's.

Public schools, by contrast, live in a different universe. In affluent suburbs, AP Literature teachers might have 25 students sharing recently updated anthologies, smart boards, and reliable WiFi. Across town, their colleagues might face 35 students with a classroom set of deteriorating paperbacks. Fifty miles away in rural districts, a single teacher might cover all high school English classes while supervising yearbook and coaching debate.

The problem penetrates much more deeply than resources. Resources are the limiting factor on what I’m coming to think of as implementation imagination. What is possible? What might educators dare to envision? At Washington Heights, imagination means dreaming of keeping the library open an extra hour if the English teacher volunteers; at Phillips Exeter, imagination means planning next semester's visiting scholar series.

In rural Idaho, a creative English teacher imagines cobbling together an AP Literature class for all 15 seniors; at Dalton, teachers imagine which university archives their students will access for their Joyce research. One school's boldest vision is finding funding for SAT prep workbooks; another debates between Princeton Review and Kaplan for their on-site testing center. A Sacramento teacher imagines success as maintaining engagement when 42 students share 30 copies of Hamlet; across town, teachers plan which three Shakespeare productions their students will critique during the department's annual Ashland pilgrimage.

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These same consultants who treat college preparation as a luxury commodity often shape education policy, including initiatives like Project 2025, perpetuating a system where academic achievement is positioned as merit rather than the predictable outcome of accumulated advantage and disadvantage. From the air conditioned tracks of elite prep schools to the potholed paths of underfunded districts, the marathon metaphor exposes how thoroughly opportunity hoarding has been normalized in American education.

Sociologist Charles Tilly¹ identified opportunity hoarding as key to perpetuating inequality between social groups. Tilly exhaustively details the roots of opportunity hoarding in the food supply, an ironic twist on the “fine dining” metaphor of college prep. I particularly resonate with the following use of quantitative data to put the spotlight on qualitative understanding:

Richard Reeves' Dream Hoarders (2017) exposes how upper-middle-class families employ sophisticated opportunity hoarding strategies: Leveraging zoning laws to concentrate school funding, using private tutoring to secure advanced placement, and accessing elite college counseling services that market themselves with "fine dining" metaphors while positioning educational advantage as something "deserved." Even well-resourced public schools participate in this hierarchy, offering better student-teacher ratios and technology than high-poverty schools, while still falling far short of elite private education. Hoarding is paying off for the upper middle class.

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Researching entering college freshman from the public sector to discover the meaning they hold for their upcoming experience and entering freshman at Harvard and Yale could be a significant qualitative topic for a doctoral dissertation; the ubiquity of First Year Experience courses could provide a pool of subjects to study. The First Year Experience Movement starting in the early 1970s at the University of South Carolina (USC) and has spread across the country.

After National Guard troops tear-gassed student protesters and rioters barricaded President Thomas F. Jones in his office, USC launched "University 101" in an attempt to humanize the university for incoming freshmen in the wake of Vietnam protests and Civil Rights upheavals. According to Freer (2016), Jones believed that small-group discussions with faculty would create a more humane education, preventing future riots by teaching students to "love the university."

Mid-level public universities began offering courses called “First Year Experience,” a credit course intended not to prevent riots, but to orient students to their new life as a college student. I taught a section of First Year Experience myself and came to understand just how little even competent high school graduates understand about the “university.” Being a student in my course, for example, meant understanding Student Affairs, how to appraise course offerings, what to consider in declaring a major—entrees on the menu for breakfast at the fine-dining restaurant.

Many students were not used to spending time with a university advisor. Many were fearful of visiting a professor during office hours. Most weren’t aware of opportunities to organize events, clubs, or take on leadership roles. Most were unaware of what Student Affairs calls the “co-curriculum.” Many didn't realize, for example, that community service work linked or unlinked to courses could be valuable opportunities to learn part of the meaning of life as a scholar.

The structure and intent of FYE at the elites is packed with awakenings like common schools but plays out differently—implementation imagination at work. The First Year Retreat and Experience program at Harvard, the analogue to the course I taught, is a pre-orientation initiative designed specifically for first-generation, low-income, and underrepresented students. It provides these students with the resources and community to build the confidence they need to navigate their first year at Harvard. Yale offers a first-year seminar program as well. Each seminar is limited to 15-18 students depending on the discipline. Instead of focusing on how to choose a major or what to expect from your professors, the goal is to socialize new students into the intellectual demands of the university.

The first-year seminar at a regional public university teaches survival skills in an unfamiliar culture—how to decode basic academic customs and navigate institutional structures. Students learn that syllabi are contracts, that professors expect emails to have subject lines, that office hours are not punishment sessions. They practice using a course catalog, learn what an academic advisor does, discover that the writing center is free. It's a crash course in being a college student, the hidden curriculum that prep school students absorbed through osmosis since kindergarten.

Meanwhile, Yale’s freshman seminars assume complete fluency in these academic basics. Their students already know how universities work; they've been groomed for this environment since preschool. Instead, these seminars focus on intellectual initiation: Engaging in scholarly discourse, pursuing original research questions, and participating in academic debate at the highest levels. While public university students are learning where to find the library, Harvard students are learning how to challenge established scholarly paradigms. One seminar teaches students how to be students; the other teaches them how to be scholars.

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The historical stakes could not be higher: Democracy requires an educated citizenry capable of critical thinking, of distinguishing fact from propaganda, of understanding how power operates through narrative. While prep schools teach their students how to write the scripts of American power, public school students must at minimum learn to read those scripts critically. Abandoning public education now, as extremist forces push to replace it with vouchers and school choice around partisan curricula, threatens not just individual students but the very possibility of democratic governance. The academic train carries more than just college aspirations—it carries the future of American democracy itself. Implementation imagination in schools, the capacity to dream big and then figure out how to implement, is in a political stranglehold in America.

1. Tilly, C., 1998, 'How to Hoard Opportunities' in Tilly, C., 'Durable Inequality', University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, pp. 147-169