Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Our local public high school

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.