Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Subject vs whole grade acceleration

I am currently having a conversation with my son's school about accelerating him in all subjects while continuing to call him his grade by age. I'm wondering if there are any rules or laws surrounding the labeling of grade level.

This is actually more complicated than I am making it seem. My son is 10 years old and would be in 5th grade according to his age. He is currently placed in 6th grade at a private school (that runs from grades 6-12) where he is further accelerated in math (8th grade algebra). For most subjects, he is in a combined 6/7 class. I think it would be in his best interests to have him stay with this year's 7th graders next year. So he would end up being accelerated two whole grades with an additional year of acceleration in math.

But--and here is where it gets complicated--I would also like his official grade level (what he is called on school documents) to be his grade-by-age. So what this would mean is that next year, he would be called a 6th grader (for the second year in a row) who is taking 8th grade classes across the board (and 9th grade geometry).

My reasoning is that by doing this, he can keep his options open (I'm thinking mostly about dual enrollment options). It would just be a matter of paperwork to change his grade level up if need be. I've been told that he will receive high school credit for high school level courses taken in middle school.

Are there any potential pitfalls to this plan that I'm not seeing? Aside from it being weird, I mean.

Thanks!

My state won't let you do that, so I haven't thoroughly thought it through. If they would, I'd be completely in favor of it for my DD.
- You're compared against your agemates for talent search.
- You aren't precluded from doing camp that requires a certain match of grade and age
- You aren't fast-tracked out of high school, with your college choices limited either by age or ability to live independently far away, but can dual-enroll to get the higher level of challenge
- You can leave high school with a diploma based on high school level courses taken if that seems like a better idea

It takes some planning to get your NMSF eligibility right. (It works out funny when you leave high school at the wrong time, such that you might entirely miss out on National Merit scholarships available only to entering freshmen.)

Dual enrollment in my state requires you take at least 2 high school courses each term, and at some point, you may run out of courses worth the time.

It may be administratively difficult for the school, if Class X is limited to kids in Grade Y, or if the scheduling in general makes cross-grade enrollment difficult.

I don't think you'd be allowed to do that here. If you're taking 7th grade math, you are identified as a 7th grader for all state math assessments, and so on. If you're taking everything a grade up, I believe you'd be counted as being in that grade.

Nice idea, though.

DeeDee

I agree with both of the above posters-- but I also have some direct experience with this one, too.

This IS what we did with my DD for her "second" gradeskip-- from 7th through 9th grades, she was taking coursework a year (or more) beyond her on-paper placement.

Complications not mentioned previously:

a) NCLB/state testing will be for level/designation year, NOT placement, and testing at the correct level is important administratively... it can get complicated, but as long as everyone is aware and cooperative, it's not insurmountable.

b) different states have different rules about when graduation cohort years are assigned officially. My DD needed permission directly from the state board of education in order to take high school coursework for credit without being assigned a graduation cohort year as a 9th grader.

c) as noted, NMSQT/PSAT complications regarding expected graduation dates and cohort years, etc.


Just a matter of paperwork if you change your minds? Well, mayyyyyybe-- but that can be a bigger deal than it should be if you get a district administrator who is in a dither over keeping your kid enrolled longer (enrollment $), or simply doesn't LIKE the idea of early graduation, and if you run out of authentic challenge ahead of schedule, that can mean your child drops out with no diploma as a least-worst option... it also means that you have to be VERY careful when you make that jump. We recently had to think about this since it would have messed up eligibility for NMS and NHS both to have done the skip any later than last January for DD.


High school credit for high school coursework...

Hmmm. Again, this varies by administrator. Get it in writing. We did and I'm eternally grateful that I had the foresight to do that, even though they made me feel slighly skeezy about it at the time. (What? You don't trust us? Why, no. No. Actually, I.. er... don't. Because y'all break your word all. the. time. )

Related to that, be VERY sure you know what the state, district, and school each have to say about the accumulation of credits, specific course requirements, and automatic graduation-- and "Full time enrollment" as well as any age restrictions which exist for "dual enrollment" or other alternative paths out of high school. In my own state, this constitutes a really formidable maze of regulations. Caveat Emptor. Big time.

Okay, the other thing which will be a problem here is that it causes a LOT of confusion in terms of any academically-oriented extracurriculars, and in the end, it MAY be a cause for some of those external agencies to simply shut you out because of suspicions that you're trying to do an end-run around eligibility for competitive benefit or something. BTDT. It means that you're darned if you do, and darned if you don't. If your child is a 10th grader, they're in a different competitive category for academic competitions, for 4H, for Lego Robotics, etc. So if your child is TAKING all 10th grade coursework, and yet you're CALLING him/her a 9th (or 8th) grader, what gives?

If it provides a competitive advantage, you'll be accused of cheating, and if you acknowledge that and go with the 'older' age bracket, then you'll be accused of "playing fast and loose" by not using a SINGLE designation of "what grade/age is the entrant" for everything. It's no-win, actually.

See what I mean? We ran into a lot of that. The upshot was that they didn't know WHAT to make of DD, and so they stalled and stonewalled until deadlines went by and she was effectively shut out. Now, some of that can be attributed to disability access issues in her case, but by no means all. In the end, it was actually just easier to jump that grade and have things realigned, even though it means that she's been gradeskipped a full 3y.

Thanks to everyone for your replies!

Just to clarify, this is a private school--and a tiny one, so they are pretty flexible--and they don't have to deal with state testing or regulations that only apply to public schools.

I totally get that in the public system there is a lot of red tape that is insurmountable.

I'm wondering if there is anything that applies to both public and private schools I might be missing--or anything else that is not a public school issue.

I have to admit that one of the reasons I had for trying this approach was because of the competition thing. It seems to me that it is fairly standard practice to accelerate gifted math kids one, two, or three levels while still calling them a whatever grader. Do the math competition people make them compete at the higher level?

Oh, good catch - I totally forgot that one. In my state, you have to have at least junior standing (summer after sophomore year counts) and have at least a 21 (55th percentile) on the ACT in order to do dual enrollment. There's another category ("Opportunity Admissions") for kids whose birth cohort hasn't graduated high school, but it requires an ACT composite of 30 (95th percentile), which is a heck of a difference.

Dual enrollment kids get 6 credit hours a semester free; opportunity admissions kids pay for every hour.

Yeah, that bugs me, too. The rich-folks district in our area has enough 6th graders in Algebra I (a 9th grade class in my DD's district) that their middle school planning guide addresses that situation. Our district has twice as many kids per grade, and when I asked about a 7th grader taking Algebra I, I got, "Oh, yeah, that happened once." Not exactly a level playing field in terms of opportunity.

You could choose to accelerate in everything but Social Studies, maybe. (That's got a pretty rigid pacing in my state, and acceleration doesn't really give you more challenging material.) That keeps you in contention with the schools where the highest track is labeled as grade X, but teaching grade X + 2 or X + 3 material. But unless the entire school district is intentionally designed around that system, everything breaks when it gets to your kid.

In the UK the maths competitions are all done by which school year you're officially in, not by how old you are or what you're studying in maths, so in that sense you're right, keeping him officially with agemates would be a win. The IMO, the ne plus ultra of maths competitions, says competitors have to be both under 20 and not enrolled in a university or equivalent. I've often wondered whether that rules out dual enrollment; this would be a thing to check if your child might be going that way. (We don't have dual enrollment, but it's certainly the case for some young mathematicians that they have to choose between being competitive in the IMO and going to university full time early. I noticed, for example, that Arran Fernandez, who was in the news a few years back for being at 14 the youngest student admitted to Cambridge for a very long time, competed - for Bolivia not for the UK (dual nationality?) - the summer before he went up, and came around the 25th percentile, i.e. did not terribly, but less well than any of the UK competitors. Had he stayed in school another 4 years, I'd assume he'd have done much better, but he obviously judged it better to go on to university. This may well have been a good call in his case, but in general it's a tricky area, because it's very easy to qualify for university by being able to solve routine problems only, where competition participation develops ability to solve hard problems. I can think of at least one other person who went to university early on the strength of doing school exit exams early but did not have anything other than routine maths skills; that seems a real waste of opportunity [ETA since he was reading maths at university, I mean!].)

For the earlier competitions, there's a sense in which it doesn't actually matter as much as you might think, just because maths achievement is so decoupled from age. None of the (UK at least, and I think it's the same in the US?) competitions set a lower bound for age or grade, and in practice, a large number of competitors are many years/grades younger than the maximum age/grade of the competition (the last competition DS9 did, and did well in, was open to some 19yos, for example). Typically, these competitors don't (and shouldn't according to Richard Rusczyk for example) carry on doing competitions until they age out of them; having done very well once, they move on. So there's a crude sense in which, if you have to ask, you aren't competitive anyway; and in that case, why not just do each competition for fun whenever you qualify and not worry about it? (I suppose one might be concerned that it limits opportunities to use competition success to help with college entrance? But this is a completely general concern: accelerating carries the risk of not shining by comparison with new apparent peers. Usual options apply; live with it, or don't accelerate that much, or decelerate at the end so as to shine then. Specifically for maths competitions, if you end up doing well in a "terminal" competition, noone's likely to care how you did on earlier ones.)

I am fairly certain that my son is probably not going to be winning any big math competitions, but he does like to do them for fun and keeping him at a level more in line with his age will also keep them fun for him.

Many thanks to everyone who has responded so far. You have given me much to think about.

We've always wound up with dd14 competing against much older kids and I have to admit to mixed feelings. For instance, she is competitive for things like National Merit, but if she misses it by a hair it will likely be b/c she will be a very young 15 y/o high school junior when she takes the PSAT rather than a 16 or 17 y/o junior. Likewise, when she did talent search years ago. She wound up making the awards ceremonies, but wasn't a top scorer. Again, though, she was being compared to kids who were much older than she b/c they looked at grade level not age.

On one hand, I do feel that it is fair to look at grade level b/c she's had about as much education as older kids. On the other hand, I know that there are people doing exactly what the OP mentions: have kids who are doing multiple years of subject acceleration in math and other subjects but who are still called 8th graders or 6th graders or whatever on paper, so they've had much more education than the other kids of the same grade to whom they're being compared.

What I try to remind myself is that getting an appropriate education and learning work ethic is more important that winning contests. It is harder when you are dealing with things like National Merit, though, b/c there is potentially money involved for college and that is something we really need.