TALES OUT OF PRESCHOOL.(need for universal preschool education)

The scandal at the 92nd Street Y Nursery School--an institution that anxious plutocratic parents in New York City believe will facilitate their progeny's acceptance to Harvard and teach toddler barons social-climbing skills when they have barely learned to walk--is a reminder of how far a C.E.O. will go to keep a valued employee happy. Jack Grubman, formerly a top analyst at Salomon Smith Barney, the investment-banking division of Citigroup, and the father of young twins, sought the help of Sanford Weill, Citigroup's chief executive, in placing his children at the Y. Grubman later described a satisfying transaction in an e-mail to a friend: he had raised his rating of stock in A.T. & T., a potential Citigroup client, as a favor to Weill, and the Grubman twins appeared on the preschool's rolls. Citigroup, in the meantime, pledged to donate a million dollars to the Y. Now Grubman denies that there were any quid pro quos, saying that he invented the story to show off. Weill says that he never tried to influence Grubman, and that the donation to the Y was part of the company's philanthropic program. Weill does acknowledge that he put in a word with the school in support of the academic aspirations of the Grubman siblings, saying of their father, "He was an important employee who asked for my help."

The preschool-age children of the twenty-five thousand five hundred Citigroup employees in New York City who aren't as important as Jack Grubman have to make do with rather less in the way of child-care opportunities. The company maintains two child-care centers, one in midtown and one in Tribeca, and shares a third in the Financial District. They are all amply equipped with building blocks and art supplies and computers, and are staffed by qualified teachers--in short, they are the kind of facility in which most parents would be thrilled to place their children, even if they didn't get to share a dramatic-play area with Woody Allen's kids. Unfortunately, the centers are available to employees only in emergencies--when a babysitter is sick, or when schools are closed on those national holidays which go unobserved by Citigroup. Employees can leave their children at a center up to twenty times a year. (Special provision can be made for, say, a mother just returning from maternity leave who needs to be nearby for nursing, or an employee who is left in the lurch for a couple of weeks by a nanny handing in her notice.) Most employees with children use the centers between six and eight times a year--a testament to the scope and efficiency of the primary child-care arrangements that parents make on their own.

As it happens, Sanford Weill himself has a long-standing interest in the impact of child care upon the success of a business: in 1988, he was the chairman of an advisory committee in Maryland which studied how to attract businesses by offering improved child care for employees. And Citigroup has been praised by children's ...