We live in a neighboring district. Here's my impression of Cupertino schools and parents:
1. Likely very high pressure. Last summer, my eldest often attended a Sunday gaming day in Cupertino. I'd drop him off and go to the library. Even on a Sunday in July, the quiet rooms and desks in other areas were always packed with kids doing AP summer coursework. They didn't look like they were there out of love of learning so much as out of compliance.
It was the same on a few occasions when I ended up at the library on non-Sundays during the summer. Very depressing.
IMO, this stuff starts in grade school. I suspect that there are an awful lot of tiger parents in Cupertino.
2. Cupertino schools are still California schools, and that's not a good thing. When we bought our house, our real estate agent (from Saratoga, another high-pressure district) told us that the reputations of the good local schools were due to the parents, not the schools themselves. There was a lot of truth in that statement. Kumon and other tutoring services are very, very popular around here.
3. I worked at a skating rink in Cupertino for a while on Saturdays. The first thing they told me when I started was to stay in the center of the rink on report card days to avoid the parents, who would get angry at me for not passing their snowflakes from, say, pre-Alpha to Alpha. In the end, the parents would just sign the kids up for Alpha anyway, and you'd end up with students who hadn't mastered the skills necessary for that level. One of the teachers once had a class she called "pre-freestyle-2" because none of her students had passed freestyle 1 but all had been enrolled in level 2. She mostly taught them the level 1 skills.
This is my way of saying that the pressure for externally visible success in Cupertino is very high.
4. You will pay $1 million for a shack on a postage-stamp-sized-lot in Cupertino.
