June 16, 1999
By QUENTIN HARDY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
interactive.wsj.com
Fast Times at Palo Alto High:
It's High Tech and High Anxiety
PALO ALTO, Calif. -- When a group of students at Palo Alto High School built their robot, they had trouble running the design animation program. So they built a supercomputer.
"The animation team had to pull a bunch of all-nighters," says senior Sonia Sinton, admiring a stack of desktop machines cobbled into one big parallel processing computer. Her pal, Tintin Yang, chimes in, "It's really hard to do this and keep getting A's in your courses."
Such are the challenges of high school in the heart of Silicon Valley. Here, where world-changing industries are born and millionaires arise overnight, high expectations and high technology combine to produce a high school that isn't quite like any other.
Paly, as Palo Alto High is known, has a campus computer network with "digital lockers" where students keep their work and a T1 high-speed data line linking the high school to the Internet. A typical student workload includes sophisticated Web-page design. Fourteen video cameras serve 18 computers for student-made documentaries. A recent front-page story in the school's award-winning newspaper told of a sophomore who rerouted the school's Web site traffic to an outside computer server and tried to sell its online domain address.
When they graduate today, some members of the class of '99 will still be making up their minds about where to spend their next few years. But if last year's class is any guide, 98% will go on to college, with roughly one-fifth heading for the Ivy League or nearby Stanford University. "The families here work in high tech, and have expectations that their kids will be competitive not just nationally, but internationally," says Scott Laurence, Paly's assistant principal.
The love for education comes from the top down. Despite their own busy schedules, parents last year volunteered some 20,000 hours to Paly, raising over $200,000, writing computer programs and donating castoff corporate computers. So many parents signed up to help out in the college information center -- which makes sure that as many kids as possible get into the best possible schools -- that Paly has to hold a lottery to decide among them. One of this year's winners was Maria-Cristina Page, a real-estate agent, who says she and her doctor husband sold their house and moved into a rental to send their daughter to the University of Pennsylvania.
More than 15 nationalities are represented among Paly's 1,400 students, thanks to the influx of immigrants to this area's high-technology mecca. There are Mercedes sedans and Volvos in the student parking lot, cell phones in the hallway and recent graduates with names like Jobs and Hewlett, the daughter and grandson, respectively, of local computer legends who are as revered by Paly students as film stars are at Beverly Hills High.
Above all, Paly exudes a belief in success -- perhaps even more so than other high-achieving schools, like Greenwich High in Connecticut, or New Trier High School in Winnetka, Ill. It comes, students say, not just from the parents, but also from hanging out in a place where the future is being born.
'A Lot of Pressure'
"You see the jobs people have, the high cost of living here, and you feel a lot of pressure to support this lifestyle," says junior Chris Powell, taking a break from his auto shop class, where two SUVs are up on lifts. A former bike racer who started competing at age 11 and injured both knees at 15, he worries that he doesn't have the grades to get into a good college and "be on track for a high-paying job." Still, he plans to go to college, like almost everyone else at Paly.
The outsize expectations here extend to the curriculum, too, which includes not just the usual AP classes but also college-level art history and music theory. "I've had seven different student projects that required Power Point presentations," says senior Phil Polansky, referring to a program normally used in business meetings. At another desk, Jennifer Creason talks of pulling three all-nighters in a row to finish a Web page that was part of a physics project. These two also work in robotics, an honors class divided into teams for tool acquisition, design and even public relations to raise funds to support student competitions -- in other words, an organization very like a high-tech start-up company.
The anxieties are similar to a start-up company's, too. Paly, which last year reported average combined SAT scores of 1222 (205 points above the national average), is "a hard place to go to school," says Marilyn Cook, the school's principal. "There's pressure to achieve in everything -- it can make the brightest kid in the world feel inadequate." In recent years, the school eliminated the post of class valedictorian, and stopped listing students' academic rankings, to ease competition. And cheating is a constant source of angst. After a scandal erupted at nearby Saratoga High, Paly brought in ethics coaches to teach kids how to compete without losing their souls.
In some ways, Paly feels like any public school anywhere. The main buildings date from 1916 and some roofs leak rain onto 30-year-old carpets. Students may have computer networks at home, but they use vintage 1973 math books.
The lunchtime cliques include the usual groups of jocks, actors and nerds. As with most schools, the athletes are considered the coolest, but at Paly, the hierarchies are in flux. "We're the nerdery, not with the cool kids," says Mr. Polansky, part of the robot crew. "But we're not the lowest. They need us to run the school, since lots of our teachers can't use the technology."
'Snowball Effect'
The robotics teacher, Douglas Bertain, nods at the idea. Five years ago, this classroom held 22 drafting tables, and not a whiff of the digital explosion. "I'm an old woodshop teacher who just started learning this stuff," he says. "I just take the smart students and have them teach the others -- there's a snowball effect."
Many on the faculty worry about the pressure to excel. Much of it, they say, comes from the parents, many of whom are used to being at the top of their field. "A parent called me and said, 'Help me, my son loves history . . . What good will that do him? Try to get him into math or sciences,'" says sociology teacher Tom Rowland, eating his brown-bag lunch in a cramped faculty room. "I told him, 'One, he was talking to the wrong guy, and two, if I see a kid interested in anything, I tell him to push it.' "
The drive to succeed at Paly affects even those who don't come from high-achieving families. "Most of these people live in a different world from me," says Carolina Huerta, a 17-year-old senior following her two-year-old son, Ricardo, across the sunny campus at midday. "They don't know how lucky they are to live the way they do."
Miss Huerta, who lives with her mother in one of Palo Alto's few subsidized apartments, says she felt pressure to drop out of Paly when she became pregnant her sophomore year and Ricardo's father moved away. But she was determined to stay on: "I wasn't going to let my pregnancy be an excuse -- no way am I going to be another statistic, another Latina who didn't make it."
She pulled her own all-nighters -- with Ricardo -- and still passed all her courses, despite holding down a job at a nearby Sears, Roebuck & Co. She expects today's graduation to be "the second-happiest day of my life," and leaves Paly with ambitions to become a nurse. |
