My excellent colleague-in -blogging at the New America Foundation had the same reaction that I did yesterday about the plight of elite parents in New York City in search of private schools -- as in "oh, no, not again,'' after reading the story displayed so prominently in the New York Times

However, Sara Mead took it a step further, offering some tremendous resources to help reporters find more meaningful stories about pre-kindergarten.Here are some from her Early Education Watch blog.

I do have to say one thing in defense of the New York Times story: it was likely gobbled up by the small population of nervous private school wannabe parents, and likely seen elsewhere in the country as one of those "aren't New Yorkers crazy'' pieces.

Such stories are annoying to those who know they stray far from the issues and obstacles that deeply impact a much wider population struggling with finding quality child care and early education options, but they are enormously popular. Here's a link to a piece I wrote in 2004 for Bloomberg News, that ran in the Seattle Times and all over the world. Not exactly hard-hitting investigative journalism, but you know what my editors wanted? More stories like it, because by internal measures such pieces were among the most popular and well read of the year. (I must have written three or four similar pieces)

Of course, back then there weren't as many bloggers ready to jump in with sarcastic commentary aimed at shaming journalists and reminding them of their critical role -- to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

There's plenty of room to do so on the pre-kindergarten front, and Mead's resources are a great starting point. That's not to say headlines won't fly around the world when New York City's private kindergarten tuition top $35,000 annually, which will likely happen by 2010.