"This can be true. But money isn’t everything. My kids competed against schools that had huge budgets and even ran Science Olympiad as a separate class while we had to do everything on a shoestring. Every year it was uncertain whether the school district would cough up enough money to get the kids a bus to go to the State contest. (Which they qualified for every year my kids were in the high school.) "
It wasn’t necessarily a matter of money. It was a matter of having teachers who were aware of such opportunities, and knew how to support kids to be successful in them. My kid is now getting involved with all kinds of things she had never heard of and never would have heard of at her school, and they didn’t turn up in the investigations both of us have made on the web. In her case it was also about meeting kids who attended specialized arts schools.
As far as those team things go, it’s also not just about money. I wish it were as simple as organizing transportation. You need enough kids to participate and care about it and that’s not so easy at a school with a limited number of top students.
Maybe. But I think the importance of school budgets is overstated. Our schools are somewhat economically diverse. The kids are all sitting in the exact same classrooms with the exact same teachers for most of their years in school, but the most academically successful kids are almost all from the high SES families. And it’s not because they are all being sent to pricey tutors or supplemental classes all those years because that’s really not a norm around here.
@mathyone - oh I agree. What makes for an A experience at a B+ school is definitely a sufficiently large cohort of students and teachers that the synergy is there for good things to happen. My point is that many large schools do have that cohort which you may not see if you just look at average numbers for the school.
By the way, he decide to go against easy rank and picked more competitive yet more rigorous school. We figured its better to be well prepared for college than getting into a college using artificially inflated rank and not doing well there.