My kids are still little but someday they will go to our local public high school down the street. It's overcrowded, BUT- they offer 20 AP classes. Their Robotics Team just won the World Championships of Robotics! The regular school orchestra is going to NYC this summer to play at Carnegie Hall, while the "elite" orchestra is going to Italy! Wow!... It sort of renews my faith in public education.

Please don't assume that the small percentage of students from a large student body who are participating/excelling in Robotics at the World Championship level or who are traveling with the school orchestras necessarily learned and developed their skills to this level solely through public education.

Often such skill is developed through private lessons and/or extracurricular camps in an area of the child's interest.

Schools gladly take the credit for accomplishments fueled by parent-provided lessons and activities... essentially reaping the benefits of what children have learned outside the classroom.

It's nice to live in an area where so many families value education so highly.




(If you were a little closer to having your kids enrolled, I might issue some cautions about that kind of setting and the dark side of this kind of pressure for very high performance, but I won't-- there IS an up-side to it, as you've astutely observed.)

I live in an area where the public high school that DD should have gone to is like that, as well. Many of her friends did. While parents are involved in such things, certainly-- not all of them are pushing a lot of afterschooling to make it happen, either. There really are public schools which provide music, art, and STEM enrichment at very high levels like this. They start early (3rd-4th grade, usually) and yeah, by high school the kids are pretty amazing.

Enjoy!

They also had 27 National Merit Scholarship semi-finalists this year.

That school's catchment area contains the zip code with the highest median household income in the state (over double the state median HH income) and a very large number of tech workers with STEM masters and PhDs who work for the area's largest tech employer. The robotics team is not directly affiliated with the school and is run by parents. When those tech worker families have a stay at home parent (by choice or because only one parent has an H1B/is a citizen), the kids are afterschooled and enriched to weapons grade levels.

Your gifted kid(s) will find an outsized cohort of gifted kids there, but they will also have a much more difficult time standing out when it comes time to apply to college. Just don't expect your PG kid to be able to compete on his own when all of the gifted kids are getting heroic amounts of assistance, advocacy, and prodding from their parents.

That is a memorable way of putting it.
The difficulty of getting into selective colleges from high-performing high schools has been termed the "Frog Pond" effect. I wonder if the arguably better education one gets at a good high school outweighs the lower chance of selective college admission in predicting success, however defined.

https://www.princeton.edu/~tje/files/Frog%20Pond%20Revisited%20Espenshade%20Hale%20Chung%20Oct%202005.pdf
The Frog Pond Revisited: High School Academic Context, Class
Rank, and Elite College Admission (2005)
Thomas J. Espenshade
Princeton University
Lauren E. Hale
State University of New York, Stony Brook
Chang Y. Chung
Princeton University
In this article, the authors test a "frog-pond" model of elite college admission proposed by
Attewell, operationalizing high school academic context as the secondary school-average SAT
score and number of Advanced Placement tests per high school senior. Data on more than
45,000 applications to three elite universitieshow that a high school's academic environment
has a negative effect on college admission, controlling for individual students' scholastic ability.
A given applicant's chances of being accepted are reduced if he or she comes from a high
school with relatively more highly talented students, that is, if the applicant is a small frog in
a big pond. Direct evidence on high school class rank produces similar findings. A school's
reputation or prestige has a counterbalancing positive effect on college admission.
Institutional gatekeepers are susceptible to context effects, but the influence of school variables
is small relative to the characteristics of individual students. The authors tie the findings
to prior work on meritocracy in college admission and to the role played by elite education in
promoting opportunity or reproducing inequality, and they speculate on the applicability of
frog-pond models in areas beyond elite college admission.

Yes, my dd's high school is like this. She is finishing her first year and overall has had a wonderful experience. The music program is phenomenal.

Ours is similar, and like deacongirl's experience, our DD has had a (mostly) terrific experience her first year. The opportunities are there for the taking, and there are enough similar-minded kids to make it work, at least so far.

Gunn/Monta Vista/Cupertino High??

I certainly would not try to dissuade anyone from sending their child to a school such as this without knowing the specifics of the child. Both my wife and I relished the learning opportunities we had and friendships we formed when we found ourselves in settings with highly competitive and intelligent cohorts. I just think it's appropriate to warn parents that a 4.0 and 2400 on the SAT will not be enough when the other kids are MOPpers, fencing in the Olympics, state champion chess players, playing in Carnegie Hall, and winning the Intel Science Fair in addition to having similar grades and test scores. If the kid isn't concerned with being valedictorian, winning achievement awards, or getting into HYPSMC, it might not even be an issue.

My original post was intended to inform the OP about this situation (with which I'm familiar since I live in the area) and to correct her misattribution of the credit for these extracurricular accomplishments which have everything to do with the parents and kids and nothing to do with the school.

Silicon Forest, not Silicon Valley.

I can't speak to the OP's school, and I think ChaosMitten brings up good points. But for example where we are, the quality of the music program does have to do with the school and not just with the parents. Sure kids get private lessons, are made to practice, play in local youth symphonies, and there is a booster club. But the daily instruction beginning in middle school by excellent orchestra directors has a direct impact on the awards the orchestra receives, and the joy my daughter derives from participating.

I did have to have this conversation with my daughter when I saw her eyes light up at the thought of valedictorian. Students are taking extra on-line AP classes to bring their GPA up--and there are usually around 70-80 kids with perfect GPAs (4.something something) taking all AP classes + stellar ECs. I know that many parents put enormous pressure on their kids. The first violin at one of the concerts burst into tears afterwards because she had made a small, unnoticeable mistake during a solo and was afraid to face her parents.

My DS16 goes to one of those schools. Top number of National Merit for the area, made top 100 in one of those top rated schools lists again this year. Five kids made it to the national level of Math Olympiad.

There are good things to the school & bad. The stress is incredible for the kids who are in all the top honors classes. The school has insanely high expectations of the top kids. The grade curve is crazy. It's hard to get those top grades that will help you get into the top schools, unless you do little other than study. I know kids who got B's in honors/AP classes yet got 5's on all the AP tests. In order to make the school look good they limit who can take the AP classes.

On the other hand DS does has some great teachers. (But unfortunately not all.) Many of those teachers really teach the kids something useful. There is a good cohort of gifted kids at the school and DS has been able to find friends. The school has been surprisingly helpful about putting together a 504 for my son and seem to understand about 2E, and has been very sensitive to anxiety/depression issues. The school is extremely culturally diverse.

We could do worse but we could do better.

LOL to the list of "Gunn/Monta Vista/Cupertino High??" Is Paly no longer the top of that list? I find this amusing but remember Silicon Valley isn't the only place to find top schools with high expectations our of our teens.

I was not sure if Paly's orchestra is going to Carnegie Hall this summer - which is the only reason I left it out Since you asked, I am changing it to:
Gunn/Monta Vista/Cupertino High/Paly/Saratoga High I am sure that there are equally high performing schools all over the country and in CA (considering CA schools rate very low, the other states must have a better share of them).

MY DS16's school/district does not do valedictorian just for this reason. In fact they don't do class 'rank' either. What they do is will give colleges a percentage 'rank".. ie in the top 5%, 10%, 25%. All students who have a 'top' GPA are given awards. There are huge numbers who have GPA's above a 4.0 every year. This is one of the things I think my DS's school does right.

They have turned the valedictorian speech into a contest. There are two students speeches one for ANY student at the school & the other for any student in the top ~2%. (There is a GPA cutoff) Students have to submit a speech, top speeches are selected for a 'contest' that students can attend and vote on. The winners give the speeches at graduation. This eliminates the problem of the valedictorian who is introverted and doesn't want to give the speech. What I like about this is ANY student can win one of the spots.

Excellent points.

As another silicon forest-dweller , I'd also add that it is important to pay attention to local norms re: adolescent mental health indicators.

Many such places have very high teen suicide rates-- or high rates of mental health hospitalizations. That's the dark side that I referred to earlier.

This kind of environment is not a good one for:

anyone who isn't HG/HG+,
those who intend to gain admission to elite-elite institutions.

The latter has already been explained rather well-- but let me further explain the former. There is tremendous pressure placed on the kids in the top 5-10% in such settings. Tremendous pressure.

On the other hand, most of the parents who post/read here have children who really can (in general) perform up to those expectations without having to do anything particularly unhealthy to do so. Kids above MG also have the chance to find their tribe more readily when 15-25% of the local school population is genuinely at least garden-variety gifted.

On the other-other hand (this is why I need that third hand, huh?) that kind of high-anxiety environment may be particularly enriched in disordered eating and other maladaptive coping-- particularly for girls. That kind of anxiety/perfectionism can be "contagious." It also means that if your child has MG friends, s/he will astutely hide how easily s/he is meeting those standards so that their parents don't get wind of it and use it as leverage against their own kids. (I wish that I were kidding about that). The KIDS may be great... and the parents may be another story if they feel that your kid is not a "good influence" (er-- or more insidiously, a 'good foil' for his/her excellence). The competitiveness among parents there can be pretty toxic.


PG kids are still like unicorns-- only a fair number of the villagers are tying paper mache horns to their horses and definitely don't want the real deal to be TOO obvious. KWIM?

I disagree, since I don't like the idea of discarding information, which is what such "binning" does. If colleges think the 1st and 25th student in a class of 500 are equivalent, they can make their admissions decisions accordingly, but they should get the raw rank. I was 2nd in a class of almost 500. To say only that I was only in the top 25 would have hurt my admissions chances and I think misrepresented my level of accomplishment. (This last sentence does not sound modest, but I don't think my classmates would have said I was the 10th best or 25th best student in the class. I was voted most studious boy .)

The person ranked 51st out 500 won't like being consigned to the top 25% bin, having just missed the top 10% cutoff.

I agree, Bostonian.

Not the public school I'm talking about, with regard to Chaosmitts! Our Robotics Team is run at the high school and is a class. They raise alot of money from outside sources but our school district does provide some money.

I think I explained this wrong. In their councilor letter sent to the school they list GPA ranges with percentiles for the graduating class, and they get a GPA from the school for this student. Not a percentage range for this student. So a admissions officer can see if a student is in the approx. 11% percentile. Every year appox. 35+ students probably have a GPA within a very close range of each other. Within (0.05% of each other) Including many with approximately exactly the same GPA.

Otherwise these students do things to to try and up their GPA, like not taking art and/or music because it will lower their GPA. Students try and figure out ways to boost the system. Or taking required classes that don't give a +1 point at an onine school. They do this stuff anyway but the school is trying to take the stress away from having them quibble about that last 0.01 percent.

If you reduce the granularity in the data set by not disclosing class rank and allowing grade inflation so the top 15+% all have unweighted 4.0s, you aren't solving the problem of cutthroat competition--you're just diverting it into another area. The competition for the finite resources of scholarships, awards, and competitive college admissions does not magically disappear. The battle is now taking place in extracurriculars, which gives even more advantage to wealthier kids with more involved parents and can also disadvantage highly gifted kids who might be pointier when compared to the less gifted kids who are "well rounded" because they are varsity athletes or student body presidents.

I think the true beneficiaries of the unranked and grade inflated high schools are the teachers and administrators who have to field fewer angry calls and emails from angry grade grubbing students and parents.

I had to LOL at this. Seriously though, isn't Lynbrook better than Cupertino High ? I thought Lynbrook/Monta Vista/Saratoga High/Paly/Gunn were the top-tier high schools in the valley/forest.

It also bothers me so much that a lot of school districts are not good in most towns in the Bay Area.


I agree with this. The focus on extracurriculars is crazy. And what's even crazier, once the kid gets into a college of his/her choice, they drop the extracurricular like a hot potato. I joke saying that the extracurricular is actually more parent-driven than child-driven.

Those schools aren't as good as they claim to be. Most of those kids are being driven like beasts of burden by their parents (and homework-happy teachers, more homework doesn't make the school better). I know; I see them in the libraries in the summer doing AP coursework, and I know/have known some of them. I also read about them in the paper when they kill themselves to make it stop by stepping in front of trains (9 since 2009 with that method alone, IIRC).

The pressure starts young around here: I've probably written this before, but my DD had to have routine but major surgery a couple years ago, and her roommate was a kindergartner with the same problem. She was doing homework while still hooked up to an IV line. During Thanksgiving break, no less.

Write that journal! Do those sums!

Yeah. 5 is too old to take your first gymnastics or dance class for fun around here; my kids were embarrassed because their skills were not even close to those of the preschoolers who'd had 2-4 years of weekly lessons already. The teachers didn't even know what to do with a kid who was so behind.

Along those lines, I worked at a skating rink on weekends for a year, and you do not want to know about the parents and their miserable offspring. There was a girl doing a gorgeous axel during free skate one evening, and I complimented her to her mother. Mom was frowning. She said that the daughter was only doing "all right" (I was told that she had merely placed second at a recent competition). I started to watch them. The girl didn't look happy on the ice and the mom was frowning the entire time.

I've seen parents go out onto the ice to yell at their kids for not doing a perfect jump or spin. I've seen kids struggling for weeks to land a jump and then not smiling when they finally do.

The day I started, the other teachers told me to stay in the middle of the rink on report card days so that the parents couldn't complain to me about not passing Little Johnny or Little Susie from alpha to beta (or whatever). When some kids failed, their parents would sign them up for the next level anyway. I remember one of the teachers once had a whole class of kids in Freestyle 2 who should have repeated Freestyle 1.

Oddly, ice skating is the one thing you can start late, here. It's actually a family-fun kind of thing. Lots of moms laughing with little ones, kids can start at four or fourteen or bumble onto the ice with no skill at twenty. I wonder if it's partly because they won't take kids under 3.5 for lessons, while dance and gym start at 12-18 months.

Sorry, the snippet of info about the aschool band going to play at Carnegie Hall distracted me while I was making that list - Cupertino High's band is reputed to be one of the best nationally (according to someone who knows more about local high school bands than me).
I will change the list again to:
Lynbrook/Monta Vista/Saratoga High/Paly/Gunn/Cupertino High

I agree. The relatively low ceiling of the SAT also has the same effect, as does the reporting of AP exam scores only on a 1:5 scale, where the score 5 corresponds to a wide range of raw scores.

My DD10's gymnastics experience involves a wide range of ages. She's one of the youngest in her tumbling class, but one of the oldest in her gymnastics class. She actually likes being one of the oldest, because the coach lets her and her friend lead warm-ups. The basic idea is that kids end up in the right group for their skill levels, and age isn't a factor.

This is a gym in which the owners/head trainers speak about their Olympics experiences in thick, Eastern European accents, where competition trophies line more than one wall, and where bad parents are all too easy to find.

At the end of this journey, you've either got the degree, or you don't, so I don't see any point in fussing over a couple of percentage points on a single exam.

Yuck. Checkpoint … Are your kids truly happy?

Well, our school, while competitive, is not in the same leagues being discussed here. However, there are certainly kids that fit these descriptions. DDs middle school academic-team teammates who were fixated on winning medals, because it would look good on their college app, for example. Or the kids who are admonished or punished by their parents for less than acceptable performance, be it academic or otherwise.

However, not all the kids are like this, and at least here, it is possible for them to co-exist. DD considers them friends, but is able to distance herself and step back from the easily recognizable craziness. (While a couple kids were fixated on getting medals, she and some others were worrying about what crazy hats they wanted to wear, or what to bring to the swap meet.) If one can maintain perspective and balance, admittedly not always easy, I think one may be able to enjoy the benefits of the opportunities and peers and stay out of the fray. And at least so far, I do believe my DD is truly happy.

As the economy shrinks and competition for jobs increases, more families (and children) may be in "survival mode."

Well said.

Aha. Here we go. Here, preschool classes (up to age 6-8, depending on the place) are strictly by age, not skill or experience. I think it's supposed to make classes accessible, but it really just eliminates anyone who didn't start by 2.5.

Are the kids happy? Yeah, I think they are. The big downside is that they have to specialize so terribly young, so by first grade you know which extracurricular is for you and you'll never be able to catch up in the rest. It means kids don't get the practice in making their own life decisions that is so important in college, at least not in these areas. The upside is that many kids, my generalists included, have at least one skill developed to an impressive level. When my first grader wrote and self-published a kid's book for NaNoWriMo, she didn't stand out - the others had achievements just as high, they had just spent more than a month getting to them. Parents actually seem more relaxed about seeing *some* sort of impressiveness in other kids, and just cultivate their own kids' specialty in response.

Well said.

I think there is a "g" (general) factor for sports, just as there is one for intelligence. An implication of this is that children with athletic talent should not be discouraged from starting a sport "late", because their talent may enable them to surpass children who started earlier.

A young woman from a middle class background that did not permit private tennis lessons gave lessons to our children. I asked her when she started playing, and she said she started tennis in middle school but had been playing other sports. She was on her high school tennis team and earned a tennis scholarship for college.

Are there other gyms you could try? My DD has bounced around among four of them before she settled on this one.

Way back when DD did dance, they were organized by age, too, but the teacher approached us and announced her intent to bump DD up to the next age group with the next session. It was all about maturity... DD was paying attention and taking direction far better than the other 4yos.

DD dropped it, though, once she had her first recital and endured having her hair in a BUN!!

Eh, at this point my kids aren't interested anymore. It's more a commentary on the weird, weird world we live in. The older one no longer wants any lessons at all except occasional music tutoring; the younger wants private lessons on-demand that don't impact her regular schedule. They like who they are, and know that learning anything they want takes just a little effort. What more can I ask?

This is why I'm sending my teenager to camp to hike in the wilderness this summer instead of all summer long SAT prep like his friends. Get him away from all the madness and get perspective on life, learn to be self sufficient, disconnect from his electronics and lower his stress significantly.

That is a great gift you are giving to your DS.

Yunasa Camp:
http://www.educationaladvancement.org/programs/yunasa/

Yes! You've just tapped into one of my favourite soapboxes-- one that advocates against early sport specialization in favour of participation and play in multiple sports!

There are strong arguments from kinesiologists in favour of a program of general athleticism that allows development in a multi-sport environment. The reality is that the young body is more injury-prone from over-specialization of movement. But more importantly, developing athletic talent requires encountering a diversity of proprioceptive environments and movement patterns to develop broad muscle memory and balanced strength.

If anyone is interested, Eric Cressey (a prolific kinesiologist and Olympic trainer) has commented on the issue of athletic development in children:
http://www.ericcressey.com/20-young-athletes-success

Elsbeth Vaino (a Canadian) informally looked at the background of top-10 athletes across a variety of professional sports and found that more than 80% of them were trained as multi-sport athletes:
http://elsbethvaino.com/2012/06/does-early-specialization-help/

I can't help but think (unsubstantiated opinion warning!) that a similar philosophy applies to intellectual development, with children exposed to training in multiple domains developing more adaptive and original thinking than those with early specialization in only one area, so it heartens me to hear that public schools do exist where families genuinely want an enriched general environment for their children.

We live in one of the cited Silly Con Valley school districts, and DH teaches private music lessons to many high-achievers/gifted kids. It gives us an interesting glimpse into the maelstrom in which these kids live.

On one hand - Re the unicorn point above:

There is a snarky label being used by kids to describe students using brute force to reach pinnacles of achievement (sometimes self-initiated, sometimes responding to peer pressure, sometimes under influence from parents). The term is "try hard" - as in "He's such a try hard."

It's derogatory - sort of analogous to the sniffing-down-their-noses terms like "social climber" or "nouveau riche." What's the net result? Kids want to appear to be unicorns. Maybe even more often - kids' parents want them to be perceived as the unicorns. Many paper horns sprouting up around town ...

So now, the kids are not only whipping themselves to take on the most, the hardest. They're also desperately trying to convey a casual, "oh it's no big deal" air about it.

Through DH, we see some of the true unicorns, and the school experience can actually be pretty glorious for them. Honestly - they are challenged, working hard, and basically moving in the right direction.

Oh but the try hards - and especially the try hards trying to pull off "unicorn." It's just devastating and frightening. We are ever-attentive to this, trying to start DS early on a balanced outlook as to "success," and always on a knife-edge as to yanking DS out of this system. With his internal perfectionist, self-imposed demands - too scary if his gifts don't allow him to pull it off without succumbing to unhealthy peer pressure/behaviors.

On the other hand - re tribes:

As DS has relaxed enough to actually make some friends, he has begun to find tribe members. He's still young enough that I volunteer in his classroom, and though there is no G&T pull out, the teachers really do try to give the gifted kids something to chew on. And it's lovely to see DS and his cohorts sometimes - even for a short while - galloping together. I honestly see them experiencing that same burst of joy I get when I kick a horse up to full speed and feel the float. I hope the days when he and his tribe mates hold on to that last a long time!

Great post, suevv. Love your last paragraph!

And we have that word, "try-hard" here, too- I can't stand it.

It's nasty, demeaning, divisive. I wish it would go away.

My D's high school fits the profile described by the OP. Like bluemagic's local high school, our school does not do class ranks or valedictorian either. However, they do provide a bell curve distribution with cutoffs at the top 2%, 10%, 25% and so on. A college can quite easily determine if a student is close to 51st or close to 125th in terms of rank.

I would not have considered D to be PG, but much to our pleasant surprise she is well above the cutoff for the top group. On the other hand, we find it a big relief that there is no competition for valedictorian. Kids don't share grades so D doesn't know if she is 1st, 5th, or 10th. As such she is friends with the other top students and they are cooperative rather than cut-throat. This significantly reduces the pressure.

I agree with mithawk- our school uses a similar system and it eases the pressure significantly.

When I was in high school - oh those many years ago - many of the gifted kids (myself included) took classes at the local Large State University.

Through a glitch in translation - this was a huge detriment to us in determining valedictorian. In short - an "A" grade in classes taken at the university was the highest grade a student could get. Large State University did not give A+ as a grade. At the high school, an "A" grade translated to a 95. Even more though - it translated to a 95 for each hour of credit. So my "A" grade in university level chemistry translated to 3 grades of 95 on my transcript. Same for calculus, physics, etc. As you can imagine, this devastated my GPA as compared to kids who took no classes at Large State University.

Astonishingly - none of the parents of the gifted kids at university protested. In hindsight, they were brilliant. It turned the competition for valedictorian at our school into an "also ran." The decision to take university classes effectively opted you out of that competition, and the culture was such that the gifted kids all did that. Oh - and there were no "AP" classes at our school because why would you take AP classes when you could go take credit-earning classes as Large State University instead?

I'm so grateful for that culture. I wish I could recreate it for my son. It was rooted in the idea that we learned because it was fun. We learned because it was right for us. I know everyhting is different now. But I wish it wasn't.

Sigh,
Sue