Leaving California...

In the spring of 2024, we made a big family decision very quickly. We had lived in Sacramento for 12 years and California longer than that but we had a sense that we were about to make a big mistake if we stayed.

We had originally moved to Sacramento as a way to balance three things - a place close enough to the Bay Area that I could keep working in tech, a place where my wife would practice medicine as a doctor in her first post-residency job and a good place to raise young children.

By 2024, our oldest was in 8th grade and preparing to enter high school that fall. Having gone to a life changing high school myself, I knew finding the right high school is one of the best ways to give a kid opportunities. At the same time, the wrong high school can result in 4 critical years being wasted with a possibility of 4 more wasted years in college.

Nearly all of our oldest’s classmates had chosen to attend one of the two Catholic single sex schools in town. He had decided that the boys school wasn’t the right fit for him and he wanted to go to somewhere stronger academically. He chose a different private school in town. While there wasn’t a selection of strong high schools, we were hopeful that this one school could work.

The first uh-oh moment was a parent’s meeting during the placement tests in January of 2024. All the potential incoming freshman had to take 3 hours of tests as the last step to admission as well as for the school to figure out which academic track was the best fit. We and he knew it was critical to get him into the College Prep program. His middle school, Saint Michael’s Episcopal Day School, had prepared him well. The school had been under the long term direction of its incredible head of school, Mary Heise.

While the kids took the test, the deputy principal who was the number two administration official at the school spoke to the parents. Within 15 minutes, I started getting a stream of texts from my wife expressing a vague sense of concern. She officially sounded the alarm when he told parents to lower their expectations on colleges and wanted to highlight how good of a choice a specific university was for his kids.

There is nothing wrong with this specific school. They produce incredible golfers. However, they are not necessarily however an academic powerhouse. While we believe kids should pick the right college for themselves, we also believe it's the parents job to keep a wide number of paths open to kids until they’re ready to make decisions on their own. Part of the way parents do this is by making sure the kid goes to the right high school. We feel that choosing where to go to college is the first major decision a kid should make with advice from those around them but it is fundamentally their decision.

While there are many different things you can look at with regards to college, I believe there are two things that rise above the best. Who are they letting in? And what comes out after 4 years?

The “who are they letting in?” tells you something about your child’s peer group. And given how much kids learn from their peer group at these ages, it’s worth understanding how schools are different. It also tells you what the teachers have to work with.

Does the school have different admissions rates for different groups? In state? Out of state? Different majors? How many AP tests does the average kid take and what do they get? What geographic areas do they pull from? What types of diversity are there?And so on.

One of the best ways to get a vibe check on who they are admitting is to look at the SAT scores of the middle 50% of the student body. There are going to be very smart kids at nearly all colleges. But the middle 50% define the culture of the school. The middle 50% at the low end is the 25% percentile and at the high end is the 75% percentile.

You won’t see much difference in these scores every 10 schools in the ranking but if you start comparing school 20-30 ranks apart you will start to see large differences.

For the record, the SAT has flaws just as all evaluations do. But it is a nationally consistent system that makes it easy to compare one aspect of college life.

The chart shows you the difference between the middle 50% at a school in the 120 range in nation, the 20th school (Michigan) in the nation and the #4 (Stanford) school in the nation.

At the first, the middle 50% is between the 67th percent and the 91st. At Michigan, it’s between the 90th and the 99th. And at Stanford, it’s between 98th percentile and above 99th.

It would have made us just as nervous if the administrator was speaking about Stanford like it were a normal thing. Going to a school like Stanford is not normal. It requires an uncontrollable mix of winning the genetic lottery, hard work and luck. And winning the genetic lottery can sometimes be as much about what you aren’t as what you are. In either case, it’s not something a kid can control. Furthermore, even if you get in it might not have been the right choice for you. Particularly in the STEM majors it can be too difficult, you might suffer from imposter syndrome or maybe it is just the right fit.

We wanted a high school that was committed to evaluating out what our kid is capable of each year, pushing and developing them and then after 3 years helping them find the right school for them. Setting a parent’s or a child’s expectations to any level while a kid is taking high school placement exams is not the right process.

Our second “uh-oh” experience happened when he got his placement results. He had done well at middle school with a very strong academic program. He had transferred from another private school in Sacramento for 7th grade after we watched his primary school go from very good to not good at all in 6 years. Our oldest had done the hard work to get back on track but it is not possible to get entirely there in 2 years. In particular, he wasn’t the best standardized test taker. He was good at taking tests based on specific subject matter but all the standardized test taking hacks weren’t in his bag yet.

When he received his official admission along with his placement results he only qualified for college prep in one out of his four main classes. I setup a call to learn more about the process. After being told a variety of conflicting things like we can see his test scores, we can’t see his test scores and my favorite, we can see the test scores after he enrolls, we had a weird feeling.

Our initial negotiations had gotten to a place where we were politely told that they would be willing to reopen at most one of the decisions but even then it was unlikely that they would make a change. They told us if he wants better to take the classes they thought and earn his way to getting bumped up. They also said continued inquiries would cause them to reassess whether he was the right fit.

After about a week of back and forth including a critical call to the high school from his middle school, the high school had revisited our oldest’s application and concluded that their logic was inconsistent and accepted him into the College Prep Program across all his classes.

There are always going to be issues or things that don’t go right at first. Part of the appeal of a private school is these processes are at least a little more flexible than a public school process. We were glad this issue got resolved. But we now viewed this as having had a second concerning experience with the school.

Over the next 4 months, there were two more similar experiences. After the 4th experience on a Thursday night, Ellen asked “would we ever move to give Connor better choices?” With zero hesitation, I said “yes.”

On May 1st, two days after discussing whether we’d ever move, we had scheduled a private school tours in two cities. In Cleveland, our youngest girl was going to visit one of two non-religious all girls schools, Hathaway Brown while the two older boys visited the all boys University School where my brother and I had attended. In Minneapolis, all three were going to tour Breck.

One week after that we had visited all the schools. And although it look a couple weeks to decide which school, we knew that we were leaving California.

Did we leave Sacramento and California because it was better for our children? Yes.

Do some people view moving to give your kids better opportunity as weird ? Yes. Many.

Would we do it again? Yes.

Has it worked out? So far, 100%. In fact, it’s hard to imagine not moving.