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Comment by schemester | Hacker News Reader

They had a decent showing at the ARML. 9th place if you include the off-site teams. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RvdE4RcA99uXvlaRl4J_...

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If I'm reading the standings correctly, they are competing as a team from a single HS while most of the others are all-star teams composed of students from multiple different HSes in a state or area? And they finished higher than noted supermagnet TJHSST?

That is impressive, even if it looks like Lexington HS (MA) finished ahead of them. Are there any other similar school-based team math competitions (I know there are lots of individual ones)?

If you read the article he recruits kids when they are still in middle school, basically poaching the best students from various other schools to join his high school.

So it's essentially the same as an all-star team, but putting them all together in the same class and recruiting some university-level talent to help teach them.

The article tries to present it as an 'average school', but it's not an average class of kids. That said, it could definitely still help kids who wouldn't have that opportunity at their own schools.

And Gainesville is the location of University of Florida, not some random 133000 person city.

> basically poaching the best students from various other schools to join his high school.

I wonder what carrots he dangled in front of the parents to get them to switch schools. Doing this for football is a big no-no and has resulted in a few scandals over the years in Texas.

Probably just the college placements are enough. The other 2 high schools in Gainesville sent 2 kids each to Harvard, Princeton, or MIT during 2018-2020, while Buchholz has sent 8 according to Polaris List. The math team has posted where their students have gone to college and there are a lot of Ivy League and other elite schools represented every year (MIT, Stanford, U Chicago). https://www.buchholzmathteam.com/college-placement

I mean, these are still kids in Gainesville, and about 80-90% of them come from one middle school called Lincoln, the best magnet program in Gainesville. He doesn't really "poach" kids as much as develop the willing ones with his teaching methods while in middle school so they hit the ground running when they hit high school. But the regular Lincoln kids and many other middle schools in Gainesville would feed into Buchholz high school regardless.

The recruiting part actually starts in elementary (there's about 7 different schools in the area):

> Mr. Frazer searches for prospects in elementary school and steers them to accelerated math classes in middle school.

> Mr. Frazer’s insight was to connect four levels of education: The kids he scouts in elementary school develop in middle school, compete in high school and take specialized classes from college professors that he brings to Buchholz’s campus.

Sounds about right that he'd push them to the same magnet school if it's the only good one in the area.

The Harvard/MIT or “HMMT” contest has teams and team rankings, much like the ARML.

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