Around here, teenagers in high-pressure school districts spend much of their summer vacations studying in the local libraries and elsewhere. They aren't there for the love of AP Calc; they're there because they're being compliant, and most of them look like they'd rather be somewhere else.
Don't most adults spend their working lives "complying" in order to get paid? Are the teens spending several hours a day studying worse off than those who are working full time at entry level jobs in the summer? There should still be time for sports and socializing.
Someone from Lexington, MA (a town with high-performing schools) told me that some students, especially Asian-Americans, take unofficial AP courses over the summer, so that a course load of 5-6 AP courses during the school year will be more manageable -- they will have already seen some of the material.
Our children are in Russian School of Math so they can get an "edge" in math. My eldest son, a rising 8th grader, has taken two AOPS courses in Python programming and will take more programming classes before high school. In high school he will have an edge over students for which AP Computer Science is their first programming experience. I don't think we are doing anything wrong.
