Silicon Valley's Brightest Parents Broke Their Own School

ro_bit•about 2 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?

JumpCrisscross•about 2 hours ago

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

roncesvalles•about 2 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.

JumpCrisscross•about 2 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.)

andsoitis•about 2 hours ago

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

andsoitis•about 2 hours ago

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

Those characteristics permeate the rank and file too.

Terr_•about 2 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

recursivecaveat•about 1 hour 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.

Silicon Valley's Brightest Parents Broke Their Own School

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