suburban schoolhouse blues

I was talking to another mom, a fellow professional writer, at swim practice last week and she told me she had taken a job rewriting a high-schooler's college admission essay. The parents were paying her $1,000.
"Wow, that sounds kind of...unethical!" I said.
She told me the parents told her everyone else was doing it, and that, moreover, the word is that colleges assume it's common practice "in certain zipcodes."
So what this means is your child will be penalized, if you're from one of those zipcodes and DON'T pay the premium.
It sort of stinks, doesn't it?
I wonder if parents weren't so generally isolated and could communicate more, if these practices would go away, or if they'd in fact increase. It does seem to me that if more of this stuff were out in the open, the public-shame factor might kick in. One positive development along these lines is a new parent networking web site School Parent Net attempting to connect parents starting at the classroom level and eventually -- the hope is -- branching out to schools across California and the nation.

A note on the Happy Tree Friends story -- I'm following up for the newsletter of a great parents' group, Parents Action for Children, founded by the actor/director Rob Reiner. I'll be calling Kaiser again, for instance, just to see if they've changed their policy. I'll of course include anything I discover on this site.