Hacker News Reader

Comment by mberning | Hacker News Reader

It has a lot to do with culture and expectations. And what you are willing to put your children through. One of my good friends is from Korea and told me about how awful it was to go to school all day, then be off for an hour or two, then go back to a private tutor until 9 or 10pm at night. Rinse and repeat. This is inhumane by American standards but apparently normal in Korea. That type of culture and mentality does not disappear when people immigrate to western countries.

View on HN

Sure... but I went to a public high school, got a 1590, and did not spend day and night studying nor did my parents have any expectation of me to perform well in school. I was just really lucky to go public schools with teachers who cared and peers that cared.

It makes a huge difference.

You’re an outlier. That’s great. Most people are not scoring that high without a lot of effort, and a basic public school education, regardless of the quality, is not going to get them there. They will need additional resources within the home and outside of normal schooling.

None of my friends scored below 1400 and none had tutors. All public school.

The data in OP shows that your personal experience is quite different than the public school students of Michigan. That's great for you, but not the normal experience of most students.

This seems to say more about your friends than anything else.

1400 is 93rd percentile. The odds of, say, 7 random kids scoring above the 93rd percentile is pretty small. I bet you drew your friends from AP/honors classes, or from some nerdy/academic pursuit.

I don't know that my situation was exactly at that 1400 threshold, but I was all public schooled, basically all of my friends were from AP/honors classes, none of took SAT tutoring (that I ever heard about) and most of us scored in that range.

It seems (overwhelmingly?) common for ones high-school friends to be your classmates.

The data is stratified heavily by race and school district. Limit to <white and Indian within a zip code> and the odds are probably much, much higher.

Highschool students are not randomly distributed to schools across America. There are schools that look like war zones, and places where kids actually learn. Moving the kids to different schools isn’t a solution because it’s the kids that are the problem.

Also, "public school" doesn't mean anything in the US in terms of educational quality. Some public schools are better resourced with more blue blood attendees than any but the richest of private schools.

This is my point. Literacy rates in the US blow compared to other developed countries.

A lot of people forget about this point. Arbitrary municipal boundaries are set up all across the US to create pseudo-private schools that, while public, are really only accessible to people who can afford to live in the very pricy areas that make up those school district. I grew up in an affluent area and went to a private catholic high school. The public school I would have gone to had better average test scores and way more funding/resources than my school, and indeed the majority of the private schools in the area.

I don't know... I went to a very competitive public high school in an affluent suburb. In most of my friend groups (self-segregated based on taking honors and APs), most people got at least above a 1450 on the SAT or maybe 32 on the ACT. At the end of the day we were taking Calc II (AP Calculus BC) when the highest math on either exam is the very beginnings of trigonometry.

EDIT: Many did take the exam 2 or 3 times, until they got a score they were satisfied with.

We still partied, drank, played a fuck ton of video games, generally did stupid shit, normal teenager things. This was largely the case in neighboring schools as well (the Atlanta northern sprawl is very large).

I'm not saying we didn't have parental involvement; we absolutely did. They had the resources and investment in our education to push us along that path. Our school also had a lot of resources. But it wasn't prison.

I'm not sure if it was the parental involvement and their expectations or the resources and quality of education at our affluent school. Most likely both. Whatever it is, I think it's a travesty that it isn't the norm everywhere to have an opportunity for that kind of education. There is so much wasted potential in this country.

Schools and even individual classes in a school can skew "smart", probably for some combination of chance and socio-economic circumstances.

My (public) high school class was commented on from grade school as being remarkably bright. But about 3/4 the bright kids were lazy as fuck and got terrible grades (myself included—and I don't mean the try-hard version of terrible grades like "oh no I got one b-", I mean Cs and Ds not being uncommon)—but then killed on standardized tests, 95+ percentile, very certainly not due to application of remarkable effort or even trying all that hard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com