Agree completely, Bostonian-- this is a really good idea.
I'd add that asking how many years it has been SINCE that early entry/skip would be another useful bit of information.
There are quite a number of past and present members with grade accelerated children who don't regret it-- from 5+ years out, even.
I think that is the information that I would
most wish that I'd had at the time. Most of the arguments against acceleration had to do with social adjustment or mythology about child development, early burnout, etc. Also-- what "genius" children actually
do LOOK LIKE. For real. Are they all little 10 year old physics graduate students? What does that vast gulf between children/parents who court a media spotlight for their kids who enter college at 14 or younger and those whose children are entirely age-typical contain? Where are THOSE kids, and who is telling those stories... what happens to those children? There is a sense that acceleration is either a perfect solution, or not a solution at all because it will be awful for the child in question. I never had (and still don't) a sense for rational, anecdotal or data-derived least-worst with respect to acceleration among children who are something less than future Nobel or Pulizter contenders, but who are clearly suffering in age-normed settings.
We accelerated because we didn't have much choice. But we've never been
easy about the decision to do so.
It has made it very hard to not examine
every bump in the road through the lens of "did we do that with the acceleration??"
