I found out how they do (part of) it. If a child living in the cupertino school district registers and is not proficient in english, they are "redirected" to a nearby school say in sunnyvale.
simple.
What can be teased out from that regarding cause/effect/deterministic is still mostly unknown.
I don't have a canonical source for this, but this nature paper gets the point across. This link [1] also has a useful chart on p. 6 to visualize the point.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-018-0022-0
[1] https://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/reardon%20dist...
If you see the above as a problem, and have a solution other then cross-town bussing, I'm all ears.
Normally there is some reasoning that public schools do well because of rich parents who can help fund the school and who generally care about their children’s education, and that’s an guess I might make about Cupertino based on your comment, but it seems to not be the case in SF.
Cupertino schools are fairly well funded, but not as well funded as schools in say Palo Alto. It was my experience that in our school the best students did most of their learning outside of class as very few public school teachers could keep up with them. From what I hear, some parents would send their children to private schools because they would do this and the schools would have somewhat better mentoring, but overall I didn't see much difference in the quality of top students from either.
- https://www.sfusd.edu/about/news/current-news/SF-Board-of-Ed... (which is clearly more important than https://www.sfusd.edu/services/health-wellness/covid-19-coro...)
- https://twitter.com/hknightsf/status/1359382113875755011
- https://www.sfgate.com/education/article/sf-school-lottery-L...
I think your idea of "rich parents funding SF public schools" would probably be rejected by the school board, so for most it's not even worth trying, given the proliferation of high quality private schools nearby. And even if the school accepts it, the community won't.
Say what you want about Zuck, but he donated $75M to the only public hospital in the city and they don't even want to keep the building named after him and his wife (who worked there no less!). Comically, they can't actually do anything about it, so they stick to meaningless non-binding resolutions.
Therefore, if given the choice, those who can are much more likely to spend 30-50k/year to send their kids to private HS than to try and go through the process of dealing with the city government. I assume that dealing with Cupertino/PA/etc. is frustrating, but not nearly as insane as SF.
There are consulting firms that help raise toddlers to be top performers.