[thatfrenchguy]

Suburban middle class parents, especially immigrants (and even more immigrants from Asia) tend to look on GreatSchools and pick Mission San José / Monta Vista / Gunn, and our crazy pressure on their kids.

It means people from there tend to have quite high achieving in life, at a pretty high mental health cost that follows them for life. It’s an open secret if you ask folks who graduated from there.

Of course, people with a bit more connections / more money just send their kids to private school instead.

[bushbaba]

The funny thing about many of those 'top schools'. You're actually worse off as top universities cap the number of students from a given high-school. Worse yet, most the kids are doing after school tutoring to boost their scores, making it an arm race.

I'd argue that a well motivated student would do better by being in a slightly worse school

[whatever1]

The most important aspect of a top school is that a student is around classmates with high drive (maybe family influenced) to succeed. This does not just create competition, most importantly, you get the signaling that it is ok and expected to study hard, to do your homework, to say no to playing so that you can finish your assigned homework.

Now if you have a top student in a lagging school, most likely the classmates will drag them down. In my school good students were physically bullied by the “cool” guys.

I think that classes need to be divided based on the performance of the students, that will be assessed on regular intervals. Let the good students go as fast as they need to, focus for the lagging students to get at least the basics right. There is no reason to pretend that we are teaching advanced calculus to lagging students, when they cannot even do simple arithmetic operations.

[xapata]

There are bullies and is anti-intellectual sentiment in "good" schools as well.

[shuckles]

This is incorrect. You need to attend a school admissions counselors are familiar with. They often can’t evaluate grades, academic advisors, or recommendation letters from schools they don’t repeatedly place students from, and therefore have a harder time making a case for high performing students from unknown schools.

I once talked to an admissions counselor for a “selective” university who could name the challenging coursework and reliable recommendation letter writers at all the best high schools in the region she covered.

[gnicholas]

Yes, and the mental health aspects can result in continuing challenges. A family friend had three kids go through HS in PA and not only did none of the kids end up in a particularly great school, two of the three kids didn't finish on time due to unspecified/emotional issues.

When we were house-hunting we took it as a consolation that we couldn't afford to live in Palo Alto!

[michaelwww]

There's always East Palo Alto but kids there face a different set of challenges

[gnicholas]

For sure, though I think their HS is actually pretty good. At least parts of EPA feed into Menlo Atherton HS.

[bushbaba]

East Palo Alto students of 'color' can transfer to Palo Alto's school district among others.

[PradeetPatel]

Grades are only but one aspect of going to a "top school", the networking associated with it cannot be underlooked. It is likely that the students will create connections with others that may benefit them in the future, the same could be said about the parents too.

[gnicholas]

OT, but I think you mean "underestimated" or "overlooked".

[ec109685]

Are you sure there is a cap? There were a huge number of Stanford and Cal accepts my year and literally nobody talked of caps. I do agree that talent could be drowned out at a school like Gunn, whereas you might stand out more at a less prestigious school.

[BarryMilo]

I find it astounding that people still talk in terms of "talent". What else, do we still think America is a meritocracy? By and large, people.perform exactly as their socioeconomic status would predict. "talent" is a myth.

[barry-cotter]

If you think the US is a perfect meritocracy you’re a fool. If you don’t think it’s a great deal closer to it than an enormous majority of past and present societies you’re a bigger fool. The same is true of the entire OECD and many countries outside it to greater and lesser degrees.

[daniel-cussen]

Not that different at those private schools.

Elite colleges have required suicidal amounts of pressure to be admitted, for decades. I went through that, just that I got in. Typically with serious Attention Deficit Disorder and no treatment, there's no way to get into the top 6 schools.

No matter how otherwise intelligent, too many points lost to disorganization. Like can't start essays until last minute, forget the test that was coming up, 0% on some homeworks, very little sleep because of the procrastination that was a direct consequence of that condition, huge late penalties, when you need 90% averages for semester grades for all courses, an 89% is an F in that setting. Like then you gotta pull off miracles to make the grade back up. And for that you have to be desperate. That was the hard part, SAT was easy and fun, extracurriculars were competitive but cool, also fun, hard part was the GPA. Crazy standards.

It's a process with many satisfied quiet survivors and a smaller number of very visible tragic deaths.