Talent is not evenly distributed geographically
The smartest students are concentrated in Santa Clara, and the Bay Area in general
The population of California is heavily skewed towards Southern California. Los Angeles County, by itself, has 23% of all 11th graders (I’ll explain in a bit why I’m focusing on 11th graders). The neighboring counties of Orange, San Diego, Riverside, and San Bernardino contain another 30%. The Central Valley, from Sacramento down to Kern, contains about 18%. The six Bay Area counties have only 14% between them.
Academic talent is not distributed evenly through the population. One measure of academic achievement is given by the SBAC test students take in 11th grade. Students’ SBAC scores are grouped into four levels: Exceeded Standards, Met Standards, Nearly Met Standards and Did Not Meet Standards. By 11th grade, 12.3% exceed the standards in Math and 26.2% exceed the standards in English Language Arts (ELA). If we average those two, we get 19.3%. Here’s the percentage of students in each county who exceeded standards on the SBAC. Over a third of students in Santa Clara exceeded standards. The other Bay Area counties also did well as did Orange, San Diego, and two counties in the Sierras: Placer and El Dorado.
Since Bay Area students do better than the state average and Inland Empire students do worse, a map that shows the location of those who exceed standards will give more prominence to the Bay Area and less to the Inland Empire than the first map above.
Admittedly, unless you compare the two maps side-by-side, you might have trouble spotting the differences. Fortunately, there is a much more selective measure of academic merit available: the distribution of national merit semi-finalists. This distinction is awarded based on the PSAT taken by 11th graders. The top 1% or so of scorers in each state1 are named national merit semifinalists.
Substantially more students take the PSAT in 11th grade than take the SAT in 12th grade. In California in 2023-24, 142,673 11th graders (28% of the total) took the PSAT and 120,205 took the SAT.
Despite having more takers, the PSAT is probably not as representative of the top 1% of the state as the SAT is. Some students who would score highly on the SAT don’t take it because they’re only going to apply to UCs or other institutions that don’t accept the SAT. Such students are probably found more in poorer districts and counties. But every student has at least the chance to take the SAT. Some take the SAT on a school day at their school sites; the others take it on one of the weekend national administration dates. SAT takers are split roughly 50:50 between these two modes2. In contrast, the PSAT is only administered at participating schools and it will thus be taken by (nearly) all of the students at a school or none of them. While every student has the opportunity to take the SAT, every student does not have the opportunity to take the PSAT. If your school doesn’t offer the PSAT, you have no opportunity to become a National Merit Scholar no matter how good you are3.
There’s no information available about which schools offer the PSAT and which don’t. We can surmise that schools are less likely to offer the PSAT if few of their students are going to apply to colleges that accept SAT scores. There is no way to tell if the lack of any national merit semifinalists at a school is because the school didn’t offer the PSAT or because no student met the qualifying score. We do know that the ethnic distribution of those who take the PSAT (45% Latino, 22% White, 18% Asian) is broadly similar to that of those who take the SAT (41% Latino, 21% White, 22% Asian) and that those who take the PSAT are slightly less likely to have parents who graduated college (57% to 60%).
Bearing all this in mind, here’s where the National Merit Semifinalists from the Class of 2025 live.
We saw above that students in Riverside and San Bernardino are much less likely than students in the Bay Area to exceed standards on the SBAC. It’s reasonable to expect that they would thus have far fewer students in the top 1% but the only way to get numbers this low (26 in San Bernardino; 9 in Riverside) is to have far fewer schools offering the PSAT.
A few amazing statistics:
Santa Clara has as many National Merit semifinalists as Los Angeles and Orange counties combined even though Santa Clara has only 4.2% of 11th graders while they have 31% between them. Alameda and San Mateo have 19.4% of all National Merit Semifinalists even though they have only 5.2% of all 11th graders.
Of the 54 schools across the state that produced at least 10 semifinalists, nineteen were in Santa Clara, eleven in Alameda, and four in San Mateo4.
For the class of 2025, San Francisco produced 30 semifinalists, distributed among 11 schools. In the nine years for which I have data, eighteen San Francisco schools (5 public, 13 private) have produced at least one semifinalist and the total for the city has ranged between 26 and 38. For the class of 2025, ten individual high schools in Santa Clara produced more than 26 semifinalists, and two of them produced more than 38.
The most any San Francisco school has produced in any year is the 16 at Lowell in the Class of 2024. In that year, fourteen schools in Santa Clara had more semifinalists than Lowell. Some of them were selective private schools but most are regular public high schools with geographically determined attendance areas.
Why are semifinalists so concentrated in Santa Clara? A cursory glance at the list of semifinalists from every city shows lots and lots of Chinese and Indian names but race, by itself, is an insufficient explanation. Santa Clara public schools are 31% Asian, only a little more than San Francisco’s 28%. If this were just about race, San Francisco would have more semifinalists than it does.
To me, the obvious explanation is Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley attracts lots of highly intelligent people from around the world, often from Asia. Those people have highly intelligent kids. They live in Santa Clara or in parts of Alameda like Fremont, Dublin, and Pleasanton. The schools they send their kids to thus produce lots of national merit semifinalists. It’s got little to do with the quality of the teaching in the schools per se.
The goal is to recognize the top 1% of scorers in each state. Since academic talent varies by state, the cutoff score required to be a semifinalist varies by state.
The exact percentages are 49% School Day only, 46% Weekend only, 5% School Day and Weekend.
Strictly speaking, you can contact a school that does offer the PSAT and get them to allow you to register but, since the onus is on the student, and the school that does offer the PSAT might be some distance away, very few students are going to take advantage of this.
I’m not naming the schools with the most semifinalists (even though this is public data), or doing a public vs private breakdown, because that might suggest something about the relative merits of individual schools and, as I will argue, this is all about the parents not the schools. As the National Merit Scholarship Corporation puts it: “Using numbers of Semifinalists to compare high schools, educational systems, or states will result in erroneous conclusions”.
Last time I checked, The California economy, and the money the California government likes to spend, is based on Silicon Valley, the success of which is based on brain power and the brain drain. So having drawn all this brain power here, why does the legislature let the UC tell the brilliant South and East Asian workers, too bad, send your kid to Georgia or the Texas for college, and pay the out-of-state tuition there while you're about it. But the Democratic party in California is basically a monopoly, and one that does not particularly care about Asians..
The UC Still Uses Race-Based Admission Decisions https://californiaglobe.com/fr/ucla-students-protest-lawsuit-alleging-that-uc-still-uses-race-based-admission-decisions/
“Meanwhile, about 20% of the applicants are granted a second-chance review. The latter reviews are conducted by the dozen or so senior admissions staff. You’ve got to understand that they are the ones who have the most contact with people like the UCLA deans and chancellors. Consequently, they are the ones, I believe, who receive the most pressure to admit minority students. Whatever the case, the data show that they are the ones who are granting the most racial preferences. This is one of the best-kept secrets of the UC system: The increase in minority students was not caused by the holistic system. It was caused by the second-chance reviews.”
I think this is about socioeconomics and the advantages you can give your child with money and also with education.
My anecdotal experience: my kids straddled the idiotic math sequence delay and also the foolish in house pre k to 11 math curriculum SFUSD created.
When I paid for an Algebra I class for my daughter when she was in 8th we had a huge advantage not just being able to afford it. Both me and my husband are electrical engineers. ( My son is one now too). My son was taking Algebra 2 while she was taking the external Algebra I class. So the three of us were her tutors and we didn't need to rely on outside help.
The podcast Sold a Story about the Lucy Calkins reading curriculum also exposed the hidden complexity. Parents with resources who saw their kids could not read paid for external help. The ones who didn't have that advantage were left behind. So the gaps widen but what isn't taken into account is who is getting outside help or taking outside classes like Kumon.
The curriculum is a huge problem. Both in math and language arts. The elementary curriculum is not teaching foundational skills. Not teaching phonics. Not teaching multiplication tables. I swooped in when the kids were little and taught them long division. Forced the memorization of multiplication tables.
This gave them an advantage as they grew up and went to college. One is now an electrical engineer and the other a neuroscientist. And a lot of this is because we understood what was missing from the early education curriculum.