Silicon Valley's Brightest Parents Broke Their Own School(www.wsj.com)
15 pointsby sanj5 hours ago5 comments
  • ro_bit4 hours ago
    > 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?

    • manqueran hour ago
      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.

    • JumpCrisscross3 hours ago
      It’s how the sociopath recalls his conversation with lawyers. Not anything any lawyer’s actually saying.
  • roncesvalles3 hours ago
    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.

    • zeman hour ago
      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.
    • burnt-resistor16 minutes ago
      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.
  • JumpCrisscross4 hours ago
    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.)

  • andsoitis4 hours ago
    ”all of them share some characteristics of being really brilliant and really fragile”

    Those characteristics permeate the rank and file too.

    • Terr_4 hours ago
      > 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

    • recursivecaveat3 hours ago
      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.