In Curry's view, the fact that most of North Hollywood's Advanced Placement scholars are certified geniuses doesn't dilute the school's accomplishment. Other schools with heavy concentrations of brainy kids fared far less well. New York City's famed Stuyvesant High, one of the country's most selective public high schools, had three national scholars this year. Curry praised North Hollywood's diversity, too, noting that its scholars included the nation's highest-scoring black and Latino students. On a nondescript stretch of Magnolia Boulevard, the grubby campus is jammed with almost 3,500 bodies, requiring students to share banged-up lockers and squeeze 36 or more to a classroom.
Many teachers lack permanent rooms and juggle schedules to accommodate the crushing enrollment.
This is a very traditional urban high school. Our kids are not getting their education on a silver platter. Yet North Hollywood has offered a high-powered curriculum for decades, part of the reason officials chose it eight years ago as the site of the district's only high school magnet program exclusively for the highly gifted. Bonoff and others attribute the school's success on the exams in part to the faculty's dedication to providing the courses and ensuring that the exams go smoothly. But the intangible factor is how the exceptionally intelligent teenagers have turned the opportunity into an academic feeding frenzy.