Dalton School...for the Elite? Define "Elite"!

I know I have written before about the importance of private schools in Manhattan, and how desperate some striving parents are to make sure their kids somehow get into the "right" schools..

In this regard, from what I had always heard, the Dalton School on the Upper East Side was always considered the Harvard of the private schools...the one with the most prestige, the highest standards, and, of course, most difficult to get into.

I was aware from before that Dalton had some facilities in this Yorkville area not far from Lexington and 86th Street..

This sign identifies this site as the Dalton Physical Education Center. By some strange twist of fate, as you turn the corner from the Phys Ed Center you find one of the biggest Modell's Sporting Goods stores in the City. Well--maybe that's no accident!

Have to note that it is not as though Dalton were the only school in Manhattan with unsually high academic standards-- I read an article in the NY Times a couple of years ago that stated there were a couple of schools on the Upper West Side that were Dalton's equals in this respect. (Notably the Horace Mann School as I remember).

However- they do not have Dalton's special cachet ( ah! love that word!)

 First, this from a 2010 article in Forbes Magazine

No. 13: The Dalton School

Location: New York, N.Y.
Founded: 1919
Ivy/MIT/Stanford pipeline*: 31%
Student/Faculty ratio: 7:1
Faculty holding advanced degrees: 75%
Notable alumni: Anderson Cooper, Claire Danes, Chevy Chase
Founded by Helen Parkhurst, who developed the “laboratory plan,” in which teachers and students work together toward individualized goals.
* Based on percentage of graduates over the last five years (unless otherwise noted) matriculating into Ivy League schools (Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania and Yale University) as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University. Click here for a full methodology.

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For instance, I remember in Woody Allen's "Manhattan" his young inamorata ( Mariel Hemingway ) attends Dalton, which they  have established with just a quick shot or two.

(I swear, that movie had one of the funniest lines in all of Allen's movies...out on a date -- a foursome of Allen, his friend the weird professor, a super-intellectual woman played by Diane Keaton and Hemingway, early on Keaton asks Hemingway that time-worn New York question:
"And what do you do?" ( so funny because it is setting someone up to pigeon hole them not only as to their status and intellectual and earning abilties, but also such a "screening" question for the compulsive Manhattanites who are only interested in "people worth knowing")

"I go to high school," says Hemingway in a very simple ingenue way, which brings all conversation to an incredibly awkward , screeching halt

Of course, little did most of us suspect just how TRULY confessional and predictive "Manhattan" was about his own fixation on very young women....(you could say girls, actually).

I am surprised I have never really bothered to do any research on the net on Dalton before this, so let us look  more now:(Well, this comes after some chatter about the school's style of teaching, "the Dalton Plan," from Wikipedia:

College placement

Dalton ranked 13th on the 2010 Forbes magazine's list of the twenty best prep schools in the nation.
Dalton ranked 5th on the 2003 Worth ranking of graduates matriculating to attend Harvard, Princeton, or Yale.

In 2003, The Wall Street Journal conducted a ranking of secondary schools in the United States that sent students to 10 selective colleges, including seven Ivy League schools. Dalton placed eighth.^[10] In 2007, another ranking conducted by WSJ produced a list of the top high schools in the nation based solely on each schools' 2007 placement rate of students to Harvard University, Princeton University, MIT, Williams College, Pomona College, Swarthmore College, the University of Chicago, and Johns Hopkins University. Dalton placed 59th out of the 65 high schools in the nation in this ranking.^[11] In 2010's "American Best Prep Schools" ranked by Forbes magazine, Dalton placed 13th out of 20 top schools in the U.S.^[12]

Co-curricular activities and athletics

The Daltonian is Dalton's official student newspaper and is published every 2–3 weeks by the High School. Middle and High School students also produce other publications, including the political journal Realpolitik, Blue Flag, Fine Arts, Shutterbug, the Dalton Paw, and The Tiger Wire.

The Dalton School is a part of the Ivy Preparatory School League in athletics. Some teams, such as varsity football (Dalton has the only varsity private high school football team in Manhattan), participate in different athletic conferences. Dalton offers 23 varsity teams (including a cheerleading squad) and nine junior varsity teams in the high school athletics program. The school colors were historically gold and blue, although they have been changed to white and blue (based on common misunderstanding). The school's mascot is the tiger.

Dalton also offers many programs in the arts, particularly the visual arts and music, dance, and theater, and students are encouraged to pursue their interests in addition to their academic curriculum. Carmino Ravosa has been Dalton's composer in residence for 21 years. At least two full-year arts credits are required for graduation, but many students take art for all four years.

Author and illustrator David Macaulay was Original Mind Scholar and Artist-In-Residence in the 2009-2010 school year, which has since been dubbed "The Year of the Sketchbook."^[13]

Admission

Admission to the Dalton School for kindergarten to third grade is based on school records, ERB testing, and interview. For grades 4–12 admission is based on school records, writing samples, an interview, and standardized testing (Dalton accepts the ISEE test as well as the SSAT test). Candidates receive notification of acceptance, rejection, or wait list in February. Dalton is well known for its diversity (see below).

In recent years, the parental anxiety created by the highly competitive admission process has been the subject of repeated press coverage.^[14][15][16] According to Peterson's, the school year acceptance rate into Dalton for grades K-12 is 14%.^[17]

Students of color in the First Program currently make up 38% of the Dalton First Program. In the 2008-2009 school year, the kindergarten was composed of 44% children of color. A financial aid budget of $6.5 million supports an outreach program for socio-economic diversity at the school.^[18]

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So, you can see that Dalton is making a terrific extended effort to provide spaces for "children of color,"  maybe intentionally trying to reverse its once-held reputation for snobbishness..