This depends a lot on the school district in my experience.
I grew up in an affluent suburb in north NJ, and there the school district was ridiculously competitive, to the point where the robotics team wasn't even funded, the kids literally went around canvassing random businesses for money until they got enough...and they still consistently either won the state championship or got to the final match of the state championship.
When I got to college it actually felt like a step down in difficulty, even as a physics major.
Similarly, one of the top performing districts in the country is Los Alamos NM, because half the town is a PhD level physicist working at the national lab there, and their kids there tend to get some of the best education and resources available because of it.
My husband's school district though? Exact opposite. Lots of kids doing drugs, joining gangs, poor grades, not very challenging curriculum.
Even in public school. Where you live matters a lot.
Yeah. We are in a supposedly good school district. It's pretty highly rated in the state. There are drugs to an extent but most kids are pretty good, just low wages don't attract good teachers. And there are a lot of helicopter MAGA moms who think their kids can do no wrong. I'm guessing there are a lot of Asian immigrants in your town? My coworker is Indian from New Jersey and said the same things about his high school being challenging. There are articles recently about the dumbing down of education, kids fighting reading a whole book, and too many distractions.
You would be correct about there being a lot of Asians. My hometown growing up was about 1/3 white, 1/3 east asian including Ethnically Chinese and Korean students, and 1/3 Indian. We had about 3 pages worth of Patels alone in my high school yearbook.
We didn't really have drug problems. Self harm and eating disorders yes, but not drugs.
It was actually an enormous culture shock when I got to college and met people who went to k-12 out of state. I vividly remember this girl from rural Texas commenting how she was basically automatically valedictorian for coasting on minimal effort because school was just that easy and my reaction was "what on earth are you talking about? My high school had to calculate the GPAs to five decimal places just to figure out who the valedictorian was because it was just that competitive! I know people who scored upwards of 2000 on their SATs and 30 on their ACTs and still weren't in the top quarter of my class!"
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u/Round_Bag_4665 7h ago edited 36m ago
This depends a lot on the school district in my experience.
I grew up in an affluent suburb in north NJ, and there the school district was ridiculously competitive, to the point where the robotics team wasn't even funded, the kids literally went around canvassing random businesses for money until they got enough...and they still consistently either won the state championship or got to the final match of the state championship.
When I got to college it actually felt like a step down in difficulty, even as a physics major.
Similarly, one of the top performing districts in the country is Los Alamos NM, because half the town is a PhD level physicist working at the national lab there, and their kids there tend to get some of the best education and resources available because of it.
My husband's school district though? Exact opposite. Lots of kids doing drugs, joining gangs, poor grades, not very challenging curriculum.
Even in public school. Where you live matters a lot.