[mlinhares]

I did high school at a prestigious technical school at my hometown, hard to get in, very competitive. The education itself wasn't that much better than my previous school but they had the name recognition and as getting in was very hard, likely the best students around town.

Almost 100% pass rate to college, mostly the best colleges. Did the education provided there affect this? Likely, but it was much more the self selection of having the best students that were doing a SAT like test to get in.

[zorked]

In my hometown there is something like that. There are two schools, one of them had a year with particularly good approval rates. Competitive parents started preferring that school, finding ways to send their kids there. That school has been sustaining better approval rates since then.

Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school.

[BeetleB]

> Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school.

Peers make a huge difference. Before university, I split my high school between two schools - one that was near the top academically, and one that was quite poor. The latter did have some smart students intellectually, but almost none did well academically because it wasn't valued by their peers.

Then I went to a very average state university for undergrad, and a top school for graduate studies. The difference wasn't that high in terms of teaching (the average school actually had much better teachers, but offset it by low expectations). The real difference was in the peers.

You like engineering? You like coding? Want to do some cool side project? Very hard to find someone like you in that average university.

Then when I started working, I started tutoring some middle school kids. The kids seemed totally capable mentally, and I was trying to figure out how they can't retain simple facts like number of months in a year. Until finally it hit me. They don't have problems learning things. It's just that no one in their orbit (peers or parents) care if they know these things. When I was a kid, I'd be an idiot amongst my fellow students if I didn't know it. So I did. Everyone did.

But if you're around people who think it's OK not to know how many days are in a year, chances are you won't know it, no matter how intelligent you are.

[nicolas_t]

In middle school, I had good grades but was considered a bit of a teacher's pet and was not well liked (especially since I sucked at sports). So I stopped doing homework, I showed that I didn't make effort to try and be better accepted. I still did any graded homework (less than 20% of the homework given) but didn't bother with anything else. Luckily school was easy for me so I still got good grades but I got very habits from that that I have needed to unlearn after.

I strongly believe that peers are important and choosing school based on the type of peers is a valid choice. As another (more positive) example, we live in HK in a multilingual family (I speak French, my wife speaks Cantonese), my son goes to an international school in English and Mandarin. Most of his classmates speak at least 2 languages, many speak 3. In that environment, it's easy for my son to see value in speaking multiple languages and he's never rejected one language. I have a friend whose daughter is in France in a monolingual school where her peers don't value speaking multiple languages. As a result she's ashamed and refuses to speak Cantonese.

[pfannkuchen]

> peers don't value speaking multiple languages. As a result she's ashamed and refuses to speak Cantonese.

Or maybe Cantonese is less fashionable in France than French is in Hong Kong?

[rixed]

It's even worse than that: in some circles, kids are expected to be ignorant, or expected to be emotionless, or mean to each others, or asocial etc. We became mostly what was expected from us, with little variations. Once you've set the wrong expectations, education is an uphill battle.

[giantg2]

It makes perfect sense if we approach it from the stance that parents and peers matter more than the teachers. Anecdotally, kids who have parents who give a crap and peers who share similar goals (seek good grades, entrance to college, not doing drugs, etc) tend to do better in school.

[margalabargala]

> Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school.

The finding here is, competitive parents have an impact on the college approval rates of their children. Get them to all send their kids to the same school, that school gets better approval rates, regardless of the teachers.

[HPsquared]

Goes to show the students are more important than the teachers.

[asdff]

Theres also a lot of college prep going on with private schools. We had far higher college adviser to student ratios than any public school. They started working with you earlier than any public school. No grade inflation and college admissions knew that and knew the reputation of the highschool. Academically the schedule, courseload, workload, things like freedom to pick different electives, were all designed to mirror college.