Silicon Valley's Brightest Parents Broke Their Own School | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley's Brightest Parents Broke Their Own School

wsj.com

19 pointssanj17 comments

> He fueled the nonprofit’s growth partly through unorthodox fundraising. Tessellations offered parents a deal: pay half their tuition as a donation for a tax write-off. “Lawyers say, ‘Please don’t do that,’” Stanat recalled, “I’m like, ‘But is it illegal?’ ‘No, not illegal.’ ‘OK, great, we’ll do it.’”

How?

It’s how the sociopath recalls his conversation with lawyers. Not anything any lawyer’s actually saying.

This structure is not an unusual in education, especially in institutions where the tuition is smaller component of the cost and you are expected to give much more than that.

A donation to the trust, or even an endowment is typical for the other component . If the institution is non profit depending on the part of the world you can claim tax benefits, or even in the tuition itself .

Accounting and tax is not always black and white . At times more riskier clients may choose more aggressive practices either expecting on not being audited or be able to defend it with expensive experts if they are.

Usually pre-high-school gifted programs are humbug. For one, very few kids who test high-IQ at a young age remain high-IQ when they grow up (remember IQ measures where you stand relative to peers your age; often precocious intelligence is just a growth spurt).

The end of Grade 8 is the perfect point to start streaming children into specialized/magnet high schools.

depends on your goal. I agree that "push them to become the next Einstein" is humbug, but "learn things appropriate to their intellectual development while staying with their age cohort" seems like a better outcome than either being bored and learning nothing in a regular class, or skipping a grade and having to cope with being a year younger than everyone else.

That "smart kids are bored in class" thing is bs unless your kid has savant intelligence (Terence Tao level).

If your kid is very bright, it's better for him/her to be among general peers and experience what it's like to be top of the class. In my opinion the confidence that this instills is more important than "not being bored". All the serious learning happens in high school anyway.

Some parents who rabidly pursue gifted programs deep down know that their kid is not special, but are hoping that the giftedness of other kids in class will rub off on their kid, or that the higher level of education will push their kid from average to above-average. That's also where the "smart kids are bored in class (and hence not doing great)" comes from.

>That "smart kids are bored in class" thing is bs unless your kid has savant intelligence (Terence Tao level).

Nah, pretty much everyone of slightly above average intelligence spends most of school bored.

Yeah, "bored" is a shared symptom which can come from a broad set of causes which call for different responses.

Some non-exhaustive examples:

1. Bored because they already knows the material.

2. Bored because the particular in-class activities are not engaging but they'll make more progress at home.

3. Bored because the entire subject seems like pointless memorization.

4. Bored because of a neurochemical issue.

5. Bored because the lesson is over their heads, and they need to be distracted.

"Bored" as the reason that a student is underperforming is almost always bs. If you're so smart then just perfect the material and ace your tests. It should be exciting not boring.

I went to a magnet high school. The very smart kids have a lot of fun running circles around everybody else.

it's more like "they are teaching my kid reading/maths/etc that they have already done a couple of years ahead on their own, just out of interest. more prevalent in the first 3-4 years of school than later on, but those are often just the years where teachers are not willing to give the kids any option but to participate in the class anyway.

California's GATE program in the 80's/90's seemed like a pyramid growing organization cash grab and possible human capital talent discovery and inventory system rather than anything enriching students in public K-12.

https://archive.ph/2026.05.02-194037/https://www.wsj.com/us-...

I went to public high school in Cupertino decades ago and still have friends and family there. Tesselations was a well-known ego trip of a shitshow from the start.

The parent body was dominated by those more concerned with networking prospects than their kids’ education. (Lots of cocktail parties while the kids were on iPads in a separate room.)

The tragedy is despite that person dominating the parent body, they aren’t it exclusively. Well-meaning parents get sucked in. Their kids then pay the consequences. (Probably get a solid book of stories, though.)

”all of them share some characteristics of being really brilliant and really fragile”

Those characteristics permeate the rank and file too.

> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

-- Stephen Jay Gould

A Barnum Effect type statement really haha. One should be suspicious of any brush that you can earnestly apply to "all" of hundreds of people's personalities at once. "Having elements of both broad category X and broad category Y" is absolutely a rich vein for that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com