But there is nothing to suggest that the snobbery gives any causal benefit to the students. The "benefit" (if that's what it is) of social branding to the parents is obvious, as is the related benefit of assuaging parents' anxieties about "not doing enough for their children". But I'm not aware of studies that show that the much better performance of rich schools is due to the schools themselves rather than a natural incident of the demographic of the schools.
In other words, I don't know that a child from intelligent, successful parents who went to a poor school would do any worse than that same child who went to a rich school.
So, to broadly answer your question, the answer is '
most likely they would do worse'.
To unpack that a bit there's a few things to mention:
- Kyle mentioned above that the degree to which someone learns can have something to do with their cohort (more specifically the efficacy their cohort imparts) - lower performing schools tend to have a lower efficacy around attainment, learning and progress, and tend to do worse (also one of the main reasons streaming makes education systems much worse, fyi) - this is the #1 effect on student progress (according to current research), so it cannot be under-stated. Students who believe they will do well, and students who are in an environment that makes that explicit, tend to progress significantly faster
- Additionally, I'm sure you're aware that ATAR is a highly attenuated mark, a lot of the attenuation relates to the results of your peers, it's deemed harder to get an 'A' if your class have a high level of 'A's' than if they don't (which is directly contradicted by research and common sense), so even if a student is achieving well their achievement can be attenuated severely (especially in VIC and NSW, much less so in WA)
- There are, always, exceptions. One of the tough things parents have to work out is whether their child will be exceptional or not. Every year there are some students from low income areas that do brilliantly, but they are few and, on average, extreme exceptions. How easily can someone determine if that's going to be their child? Additionally, something like a 99 ATAR doesn't realistically open that many more doors than a 95, etc, etc, it's a hot mess!
There's a bunch more that could be said, and I'm leaving stuff out for the sake of brevity, but we can delve deeper !
I should remark also that here in Australia, our high school curriculum is extremely flat (all the subjects are relatively easy by international standards, our objective performance in literacy and numeracy is poor, and there is no widespread use of streaming). In a country like the U.S. where the rich schools might stream children heavily and teach them high-level content at an early age, there would be an objective benefit to going to a "great" school. In a country like Australia where our standardised high school curricula seem to be aimed at the lowest common denominator, I can't see any benefit whatsoever, other than snobbery and anxiety-reduction.
1. I'd be interested in how you've arrived at it being flat - how did you come to that conclusion?
2. I think you mean our achievement within PISA/G20 - globally we are still quite high up, but that's a low bar
3. I don't think the curriculum is set at the lowest common denominator - have you read the Australian curriculum skill points?
4. More often than not Australia beats out the USA, I'd be very wary of deriving much from the USA's education system, there are a few good things, but they are largely not that successful
I suspect the fourth point will be something where we'll diverge. PISA/education system assessments are, by definition, looking at the success for an average student, parents often are interested in just the success of their child. These are, often, at odds. The countries that do very well at PISA tend to have great policy and pedagogy that lifts all students, often through very holistic/non-streamed methods (in fact European countries with split schooling systems have tended not to perform very well and the ones that shift away from those have tended to do better).
China, as always, is veryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy happy to stack their own deck here, but I suspect that you didn't need a reminder of that ;)