Quotes from Eliot Schrefer

Line up a group of Horace Mann students, interview them, and take a look at their resumes, and you'll be hard pressed to pick out the students who require extra time. So then, what qualifies these students to receive special accommodations on the SAT?

In my business - SAT tutoring - you get used to sighs. A client's mother frets over the sheer amount of work her daughter has to do to get her score up, until she reaches the resigned moment when she will sigh and observe that no one thought you could prepare for the SAT back when she took it - it was 'untutorable.'

Readers have always read high and low, and to fight that urge is to fight the freedom inherent in the act of reading itself. The only arguments that have any traction, as best as I can see it, are about whether the genre classification of 'young adult' should exist at all.

Calling a book 'young adult' is only important in that it can help get a book to the right reader. After that, it's a useless abstraction and should be discarded.

With few exceptions, the publishing industry has come to a consensus: if a book has a young protagonist, and if its worldview is primarily interested in the questions that crop up when coming of age, then it's a young adult novel.

The elite private tutor is typically ivy-educated and falls into one of two categories - a twenty-something pursuing an artistic career on the side, or someone older who has made a career out of college-prep. They are presentable, well-spoken, and are treated by doormen as guests more than as employees.

The College Board is both in the business of test administration and test prep. If this feels inherently unfair, it should - it's like a doctor whacking your knee with a sledgehammer and then offering to patch you up.

Students raised on Park Avenue are born into family situations in which overachieving merely maintains the status quo, and therefore the market is primed for anyone offering services that provide an edge on local peers.

Elite private-school educations leave students unprepared for a standardized test with which their public school counterparts are innately familiar.

Colleges accept the highest sub-scores from different administrations. So if a student takes the SAT many times instead of once, she has a larger pool of scores from which to pick out the highest math, critical reading, and writing.