Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Acceleration - negative effects

I need help deciding whether or not to push things with my school district here in NJ. We are in a small rural community that has an elementary school of 500 students max. It seems that despite the fact the my DD is several SDs away from the norm, she is on the wrong side of that norm; the RHS. Consequently, she appears to have no legal right to an appropriate education in the public school sector - she has no diagnosed conditions.

As some of you will be only too painfully aware, particularly with girls, standing out is not good. It invites all kinds of 'girl bullying' - telling lies and generally making the outlier miserable. This in turn, from my limited forays into the available information online, appears to trigger over excitabilities and sensitivities.

School administrators will then come along and tell you that your child has social developmental issues so insist that the child should not be accelerated. 'A child should be allowed to be a child' they pompously declare and insist that social development is more important than academic development. They then go on to tell you that you can always do more academic work outside of school hours - oblivious to the contradiction. Your child, the one who has to be allowed to be a child, instead of being allowed to go out and play like a normal child after school should instead crack open the books?????? School administrators appear to think that academic outliers on the RHS of the norm must have been forced and borderline abused.

I have been through all of the above and have just had our request for acceleration denied - and conveniently, schools are now out here so no discussion or appeal can be heard until AFTER the new school year has begun. I am quite disheartened but do have time to organize my case. We have done the IOWA acceleration evaluation (3rd edition) and our child appears to be an excellent candidate. We had done this because we believe that the school may resist because they did not want an avalanche from other parents insisting on the same thing. The school was not even aware of the Iowa scale and so we introduced it to a) measure this ourselves to ensure the we were basing our request on solidly objective criteria and b) to give the school an objective yardstick by which to consider future requests. As of now, they have not even looked at the Iowa scale - such is their apparent resistance to acceleration that they will not even consider an objective and researched tool.

This leads me to the real question for you guys - am I guilty of confirmation bias myself?
I have only seen articles that basically tell you that your child will crash and burn (or turn into a dysfunctional husk of what they could have been) if they do not get accelerated. Could someone point me to any accelerations that had negative consequences?

Sorry for the long rant but I am sure that I am on a road that many here have travelled - I would appreciate all advice and any links that you can provide.

Isn't the whole point of the IOWA scale to prevent accelerating kids who aren't good candidates and might have a bad outcome. Of course it can go wrong. Either where the child was not a good candidate OR where the child is not supported or is even actively sabotaged. Doesn't mean it's not absolutely the best choice for the right child...

I'm so relieved we skipped my DD... And worried that we should have held back another DD who is extremely young for grade due to birthdate.... Cuts both ways with outliers...

You would think...

Confirmation bias? Probably. On the other hand, being aware of such bias gives you the tools to be wary of acting upon that bias rather than objective criteria. It seems to me that you've done that.

Placement changes are always about a trade between risks and benefits. That can be moving to a new school, accelerating, or retaining a child.

I don't know what to tell you with respect to your local district. I guess my response would be based on the child in question-- how unhappy is your child? How rapidly did the school year deteriorate, and are you seeing really disturbing red flags behaviorally? If your child is exhibiting signs of serious distress, then that is your call, as a parent, to do whatever seems feasible to mitigate the problems causing that distress.

(By distress, I mean self-destructive, depressive, or destructive behaviors-- school refusal, if emphatic, would be enough.)

ColinsMum (in UK) provides her child with advanced materials to work on in class, *instead* of busywork. Have you considered (discussed with school/attempted) this?

(The accelleration battle with the school might well be unwinnable, or it might result in a very toxic environment (sabotage) for your daughter.)

First, remember that even though it seems like your child has no legal right, it is actually federal law that ALL children to provided with a "free and appropriate education". (I assume that you were being sarcastic by saying she doesn't.) I have found that being able to say to a school that you know there is a federal law that provides this right is often helpful in getting their attention. Another catch phrase right now is "annual yearly progress" which basically means that each child should be able to show a year's worth of growth in an academic year, if your child's scores haven't increased enough from the beginning of this year to the end, then you can also use that as reason for acceleration - to allow her to have the opportunity to have a year's worth of growth in an academic year.
Then, explain to them that as you are working to figure out the best "appropriate education" for your DD, you would like their help via the Iowa scale.
In terms of gifted girls - we have 2 of them and the wrong academic and therefore social setting absolutely turns on the excitabilities - to maximum! We too have been told that our girls need to be allowed to be kids and everything else. In the end we confronted the administration with the contradiction in their view that we could just do more at home afterwards by explaining exactly which of her "kid activities" she'd have to give up to be after schooled. We also saw DD starting to shut down in the face of a bad academic placement, right when all of the literature said we would - at 3rd grade. It was when she told us that she was tired of pretending that she didn't use big words normally and when she was tired of having to explain everything so she just stopped talking at school that both DH and I sort of freaked out. (Being high school teachers we both have seen numerous girls with no self-confidence due to bullying in elementary and we were not going to let our daughter become another one.)
I would use the summertime getting proof together about why acceleration is good - use some of the resources either on the Davidson resource site or on Hoagies. Slowly email them to the administration throughout the summer (I guarantee they read their email over the summer.)
I know you said you were looking for examples of acceleration gone bad, but I don't have any - sorry, our acceleration was a great move for DD.

Unfortunately "Free Appropriate Public Education" is not a universal right.
http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/edlite-FAPE504.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Appropriate_Public_Education
But obviously it should be, and it's still worth insisting on it.

Kerry - thank you for pointing to 'free and appropriate education' federal law and 'annual yearly progress' requirement.

Unfortunately, it looks like it would be difficult to use the latter argument ('annual yearly progress'), as a gifted child would normally have large progress even if taught nothing in school - because of the exposure outside the school. (I am playing the devil's advocate here. I do not know how to help the argument.)

Example: suppose, the child is in 1st grade in school, and his level moves from 3th to 4th grade (according to an out-of-level test, like NWEA MAP) between the start and the end of the school year. Of course, the child was not taught that in the school, but the school would just argue that the child got his 'annual yearly progress' anyway, and they have to do nothing.

"Free and appropriate public education" (FAPE) is a term of art from disability law. Unless your child has an IEP or a 504, they don't have a right to FAPE.

Do you happen to know if "gifted IEPs" (which some states seem to have) are included in this?