You actually can: if he had a better level of education than everyone else, why wouldn't he do better than people taking traditional educational paths?

As someone who participated in many academic competitions as a child, the winners were consistently weighted 9:1 private:public.

No, you cannot. IQ is highly correlated with wealth and is also highly heritable. So in all likelihood what you've observed is that smart kids win academic competitions, and also happen to be from rich families. If you take a bunch of kids with an IQ of 100 (or 115, or even 130) and put them into private schools they'll do a little better but they won't be winning any academic competitions.

The available data disagrees with you on this:

https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1238041

> The available data disagrees with you on this:

> https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1238041

That article doesn't seem relevant. 'Poverty impedes cognitive function' is entirely compatible with 'IQ is highly correlated with wealth and is also highly heritable', and with the claim that private school can't make a genius out of a kid who lacks an extremely high IQ.

edit: maybe I misunderstood, and you only were only pointing out that some potential-genius kids have that potential stifled by poverty. But that doesn't seem to be the original point of disagreement.

Some information about the flaws with that data:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259207757_Comment_o...

Let's see: https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/AMC/usamo/2019/2...

On the first page, the breakdown is 23 kids from public schools, 7 kids from private schools, 4 kids listing some sort of math circle / whatever Arateem is, 5 kids listing universities (home schooled/taking uni courses? No idea). Possibly a few of the private school kids are on scholarship. The 7 kids go to 4 schools.