I graduated from math and science High-school at 15, went to get BS and MS. My wife graduated GED and got BA in history. We have two DD 1st and 3rd grade both in the reach program(s).

On the daily bases for the last four years, after reading this forum, my wife telling DDs that "school is not teaching", their teachers are cr@p, even told them not to do the morning work they are required to complete. To the point where they repeating this lunacy.

In the school system after the fourth grade children are accelerated if they have meet certain NWEA score. So far DW attacked 8 teachers. She insists that teacher should teach 6th grade material for my 3rd grader to "succeed", because my daughter was helicopter taught spot subjects. DW claims that if they don't meet NWEA score at 3rd grade they she fail. Insists on withdrawing from school at the third grade, but that would cause her to not be able to participate in accelerated learning after the fourth grade in the middle school.

So instead of enjoying school my 3rd grader is tortured with 6th grade math to meet 230-240 band. - Ridiculous, not even sure is needed, completely pointless as DD still have a year of learning to reach this target.

This is all too familiar to me, my high school time was destroyed - because girls were afraid to be near 13 year old, I spent all time studying in my room. College was not initially much better because you are three years younger than classmates. In addition no one will hire 18 years old with BS degree. - What is the point?

WHY IS THAT OK TO DO THIS TO YOUR CHILD.

I am posting here because I want her to see. Thanks.

The point is that a child who is never asked to do anything even vaguely difficult will develop a self image and sense of self that says they do everything effortlessly. The first time they come up against something they can't do without thinking they collapse and refuse to even try. There is research to show this.

In life, it's effort and willingness to get up, dust yourself off and try again which helps you succeed. And I'm using succeed here to mean being a happy, contented, confident person. Those are not skills you just magically acquire, you have to learn them.

It sounds like your wife experienced this, as I and many others on here did. For me, it was at university where I finally encountered something difficult, so I shut down and walked away.

You experience tells you that college at fifteen is not great, so don't send your kids at fifteen. Send them to tend bar on the ski slopes in Canada for a year, get them to do some Coursera or edX courses while they perfect their golf swing. Whatever, but just because someone completes high school doesn't mean they need to go to college the next year. Hell, maybe your kids will stay in high school doing all the subjects until they're a more common college age.

Some things you might find informative to google are "zone of proximal development" and "the calculus trap". There's also an article in the NYT called something like "don't tell kids they're smart".

It sounds like you and your wife are not on the same page about this and need to really talk about it. I am definitely in favor of advocating for your child, but it does need to be done sensitively.

Additionally, I would suggest that you get objective data about your kids and their level of giftedness. What is their instructional level at school in math and reading? (If the school says they are above grade level, they often do not want to do more testing to find out how much above grade level, but it really helps guide education decisions to know.) Typically, differenciation can be done effectively in the classroom if it is within one grade level above that grade.

This.

This sounds like an issue between you and your wife-- I frankly understand both points if view. It sounds like your wife has some anxiety about your children's success and is perhaps identifying her own experiences too closely. I gather that you may have longed for a more normal teen experience without the constant pressure.

I've learned with any kid-- but especially magnified in gifted kids that intellectual readiness and developmental readiness can be out of synch.

My son goes to a private school where the teachers emphasize a high skill level over rapid acceleration. It works best for my DS because he receives very difficult work that stresses analysis and strong comprehension with *some* acceleration. My DS tends to be careless and occasionally try to do the minimum. He could be accelerated several years in math, but would not have the depth, nor learn about the hard work until he's in over his head. My point with this is to *know* your child and they are all different no matter their gifts.

You and your wife need to talk in a way that you can bond over your shared dissatisfaction of your earlier lives- perhaps with a therapist to facilitate a genuine exchange. I know you both long for your children to be content and no doubt there is middle ground. Good luck to you.

It sounds like there is a conflict regarding what/how to communicate with the children.

I don't think it's fair (to the child or the teacher) to tell a child they don't have to follow school rules, but still put them in that environment. Too much cognitive dissonance--and you can be sure the child will be confused and respond inappropriately (or, really, appropriately but not in a way that will help).

OTOH, I don't think it's fair not to communicate with the child at all.

Sounds to me like everyone needs to take a step back from their own perspectives and try to understand what will be most helpful to the child. It's really difficult when you feel you were actively damaged by your educational experience (each in your own way). It's often the case the best answer lies in the grey areas.

For instance, "I know it's difficult to see the importance of the morning work (validation), but when you are in school, there is value in learning to do things that are challenging for you." (In this sense the challenge is the self-discipline).

Hope that helps a little

- With regard to age and teen romance, it's important to note that the experience is quite different between boys and girls. Your acceleration, as a boy, made things difficult for you. Your daughters are unlikely to face the same problem. Girls typically want to date older boys (and gifted girls in particular, since an intellectual/emotional equal is likely to be older than they are), boys don't mind younger girls, and your DDs would be presented with a larger selection than most. They could still find themselves excluded due to other reasons, but their age should be no issue.

They could have other issues, because they're around older, and therefore more physically mature, boys, so they're more vulnerable than most. If they're running with a gifted cohort, those boys are often of advanced social/emotional maturity themselves, but you'd still want to pay close attention to who they're hanging out with.

- You have characterized your DW's math lessons as "spot helicoptering," and your DD's experience of it as "torture." If these characterizations are correct, then I agree, that's a bad thing. Good reasons for accelerating a student three years in math would be that the child is actively pushing for more, acting out in outrage over the school's curriculum because it's too easy/boring, and because children need something in their lives which is challenging so they learn how to overcome adversity, and build resilience... for most kids in school, math satisfies that.

So, how are those conditions met in your house? Is your DD pushing for it? Is your DD complaining about school, and math in particular? Is her boredom/frustration in school bleeding over into social/emotional problems? My own DD10 checked all three questions next to the box marked "yes" to these questions.

And finally, but most important... is there anything else she could be doing in which she learns to overcome challenges through persistence and practice, apart from math? Given the choice between alternative activities and math, would she choose math?

My DD has expressed interest all over the board, and has tried, at various times:

- Dance
- Gymnastics
- Soccer
- Guitar
- Drama
- Robotics
- Choir
- Flute

All of these are activities in which nobody is born ready to do, they all take time, patience, and repetition to hone, so they'll all do as substitutes for math in teaching practice, perseverance, and overcoming challenges. She likes them all to different degrees, but the one that absolutely captures her passion is gymnastics. The probability that she translates this passion into a college scholarship or a spot on the Olympic training team is very low, but since that's not why we're doing it, DW and I are pleased to help DD push herself just as far as she can.

So, our DD does have a one-year math acceleration, and she is complaining about it, but we're not pushing the school any harder, because, as you said, she's got plenty of time to learn it, and in the meantime, her needs are being met outside of math.

This isn't a gifted issue, it's a marital issue. Go get on the same page as your wife, get help communicating effectively (I don't know you, but posting to forums so your spouse will see it is not an effective method of communication). Your children will benefit from this more than anything else you two do.

Once you two are aligned, it will be much easier to determine what your children need and want and work together to advocate for the most appropriate education.

I'm going to jump from what Dude says above (insightful as always)-- and add--

even for girls, college at such a young age is no picnic. I don't know if it was different back in the day, as I was a bit older (2y) when I went-- but my DD15 has experienced negative stuff socially as a result of her age.

She can't go to a place that serves liquor at all because of her age-- and she's the only one. Her peers are mostly 20-23yo.

That age difference and the current sexual assault/consent climate surrounding colleges, + our state's age of consent being 18y, means that the only guys who WILL date her are the ones that are super immature/icky for some reason of their own, or those who are, um-- oblivious-- about the law and their own futures. Both things indicate not-great family backgrounds or values, I'd say. The intelligent and conscientious ones are thinking "jail bait-- BIG time."

Yes, there are those who want to save her for later, (like, when she's of age), but that tends to result in a dynamic which is patronizing and DD hates being the "kid sister" to anyone. I can't really blame her for that, given that she is in many ways MUCH older than her 18-19yo freshmen classmates in terms of her responsibility and decision-making. She counsels THEM-- and they listen, quite frankly, because she is perceptive and has great judgment.

Is it better than being with agemates? Well, yeah-- it is. It's just not awesome. It might be on a campus with a specialty in young matriculants. That isn't the case where she is attending Uni-- she is one of perhaps a dozen kids under 16, spread out over a campus of 30K students, and with no particular supports or mentoring for them.


I'll also say that you and your spouse sound much like a more extreme version of the same push-pull attitudes and experiences that my own spouse and I have over academics, push-parenting, opportunity, and what constitutes "too much" or "not enough" for our daughter.

Our situation is this:
our daughter was accelerated a lot (like you)-- but it still was nothing like enough academically-- she is NOW learning that learning is work. This is something that most children learn when they are under 10 years old, and she refused to learn it then, because teachers (and everyone but us) were too busy handing out gold stars and certificates and accolades to her just for showing up and breathing. Well-- or so it seemed to us (and her).

That went on and on-- all through high school, in fact, and resulted in a stellar resume in spite of her age, in fact, a #1 class rank, even. And now, she's in real trouble because she has NO idea how to study. She has no idea how to fight for understanding. She has no idea (not really) how to adequately budget time to get a lot done. She has never needed to do any of that.

So I say that to note that I completely understand where your spouse may be coming from.

Much depends on your children and their actual needs.

I hope that you don't take this the wrong way-- but--

it's not about you. It's not about your spouse, either. It's about your children and what they NEED. (Not what they want, but what "responsive and loving parenting" needs to be for them as individuals).

My DH and I didn't do so great at giving our DD what she needed-- and while we can make excuses about how we tried, I'm kicking myself now for not having tried a lot HARDER to get it to her, even though she would not have been happy about it at the time. We failed in part because like you-- we were too often NOT IN THE SAME MINDSET ABOUT THOSE GOALS. <-- please, please, please address that.

We did force her to stick with some things which were good for her-- but they were all extracurriculars, and frankly she was awfully talented at most of those things, too, so looking back, they still came far too easily to her.

HK: Some of my post-HS social experiences were similar to your DD's, even though I was not accelerated. I graduated at 17, but then I worked for a year before joining the navy, so I was very age-normal for my cohort.

And still, I found that "my people" were 3-5 years older than me, and those were the people I gravitated to (and who, in turn, gravitated to me). I got left out when they hit the bars stateside (not a problem overseas), and my nickname was "Junior." I hit a social sweet spot when I turned 21, but slowly "my people" started moving on (enlistments ended, new duty stations, marriage), younger people came along, and I just didn't connect with them the same way, so I began to experience a different kind of social isolation.

So, being of normal age doesn't necessarily help a young gifted person socially.

That's true-- my own experiences were much like your own, albeit I was in college.

I agree with cammom, eco21268, Ivy, and others who suggest working on marital communication and focusing on the child's needs and interests.

Early college experiences need not be fraught with angst and/or a sense of social exclusion due to being under age with a perception that campus social life is centered on drinking and/or sex. Many students successfully find a group or activity for healthy social inclusion (campus jobs, ski club, service clubs, and fitness center activities such as zumba, yoga, and weight room are just a few examples for meeting students with common interests, outside of classes). YMMV.

In addition to early high school graduation and matriculation to college, there are numerous other ways to secure placement of a young but highly accomplished student in a college or university course. This article from the Davidson Database provides many successful anecdotes, creative how-to's, and helpful resources.

While the whole tiger parenting thing is concerning, I'm not sure why your DW is stressed about scoring 230-240 on MAP math a year from now if she is already doing 6th grade math. My youngest is in 5th, but in advanced math (supposedly 6th grade math, whatever that is). She took the MAP math yesterday and scored 262 - she has never done any math outside whatever they do in school. Also, there are plenty of kids in her class that score higher than that.

I don't know how your school is set up though. Even scoring high on the math stuff doesn't get you some super advanced placement in our district. Things have changed a bit, but middle kid got 9th stanine in quantitative and qualitative math ERB in 5th grade, so then she sat for the IAAT (Iowa Algebra Aptitude Test). At that point, 5th graders who scored in the 9th stanine for IAAT then were placed in Pre-Algebra. That was middle kid's placement, but if a kid scores 96th percentile or better on the Algebra readiness test, why the heck don't they go straight to Algebra I?

Coming in late to this thread, but I wanted to comment in a general way.

Overall in the US, educational options for HG+ kids are woeful. The law forces public schools to focus on lower achievers. Worse: too many schools and teachers don't understand cognitive giftedness. Our curriculum is based on textbooks that are often subpar. Private schools can be better, but then again maybe not, and not everyone can afford them. Etc.

Forums like this one can help, but personally, I've noticed a trend here that can encourage people to skid. By this I mean 1) a focus on what may not be the most important questions, and 2) that an idea grabs hold and the negative side of it isn't taken as seriously as it should be.

With respect to point 1, I wonder about all the test result threads that have been popping up here in the last year or so, and if they're creating an unhealthy atmosphere. Tests are important, but they're only a small part of an overall picture, and besides, it seems to me that the person who did the testing would be in the best position to interpret a child's disparate scores or answer questions about his/her performance.

A good example of point 2 is acceleration. When I first joined this forum, people talked about it (or homeschooling or whatever) as a least-worst option. I don't read so much about that idea anymore. Instead, I read a lot about the positive aspects of accelerating, with negative ones (e.g. the OP in this thread) being downplayed: no really, my kid fits better with kids who are 3-5 years older. That fact may be true when the topic of conversation is chess club or Jane Eyre, but it's simply FALSE when a 12-year-old is bundled with 15-year-olds who spend a lot of time talking about dating, athletics, staying out late on Saturday night, and etc. etc. It's important to consider how the 15-year-olds feel about the little kid in their midst, or about the 12-year-old's level of comfort with those kids.

I still struggle with how best to challenge my kids, and they've struggled with the consequences of being much younger than grade-peers. I've had two co-worker friends who were radically accelerated and the OP's statements mirror theirs. Yet I get a sense on this forum that there's a groupthink at work, and that it's dismissive of this very real problem. I wonder if we have some emotional overinvestment in acceleration (subject or whole-grade), test results, and a feeling that a course of action is essential because someone else took it.


I'm just trying to write as someone who's been around the block a few times and who's seen what happens when a skipped student gets to middle school, high school, or college. It's tough. And IMO, the literature from gifted groups over-encourages acceleration and glosses over the negative sides of it.

It's easy to get caught up in the ideas of giftedness and challenge, but the reality is that the motivation has to come from inside, and 6th grade math in 3rd grade won't put it there (and maybe won't even force a HG+ kid to have to work to understand the ideas anyway). Many gifties hit a hard wall when they get to college and have to work hard to keep up and/or don't get an idea the first time it's presented. So college is one stage of life when the student has to dig down deep and either develop internal motivation or not. Sure, s/he may be motivated to work hard at activity A, but life is full of tasks that are a means to an end, and many are hard to master. For a giftie, struggling to learn to do them well can be a hard lesson, and those of us who are HG+ ourselves are all trying to help our kids avoid some of the problems we had. Acceleration seems like a natural option. But at the same time, we need to listen to the people who were accelerated and not trade one difficult situation for another.

Understand, I'm not saying Don't accelerate! Don't test! I'm just saying that I think that the focus here has become skewed, to the detriment of the whole community.

Finally, my best results have always happened when I turn off the emotions and the ego. That might help a lot here.

I went to college at 17. I figured out how to get of of H.S. a year early and never did senior year of H.S.

Looking back on it I did have fairly rough social problems in my freshman year. Academically it was fine. Although when I went to college early I was treated just like all the other 18 years old. I had none of the can't do thing because of my age issues, but that was back in the 80's. I dated guys and didn't even realize age of consent in the state I went to college in was 18 till many years later.

I also went to college at 17, although I turned 18 three months later. No acceleration. Whatever problems I had were largely academic, the result, I believe, of being unwilling to speak up when I didn't understand a concept fully. (I.e., having been so far ahead of classmates for 90% of the time, it wasn't in my skill set to have to ask for real help.)

Socially, I don't think there was any issue that age would have changed.

On the other hand my husband stayed in H.S. But took single subject (math) acceleration classes. He finished all of the math they offered at the local H.S. (including Calculus) by 9th grade. His parents were offered the chance to move him to college early and they declined. Keep him with his peers in H.S. He isn't a hugely social person but he made good friends in H.S.. And at the same time gave him a major challenge taking math & computer science classes at university at a young age. This seemed to work well for him and in my opinion it made him a more well rounded person that he might have been otherwise.

Good points, Val. I hope I am not inadvertently contributing to excessive test emphasis by being in a position to suggest interpretations. (Though we are among those families who have chosen not to pursue formal assessment.)

In general, I agree that any discussion benefits from greater nuance. Every child and family system is different, and has different options available to it, each of which will inevitably have trade-offs. The nature of exceptionality in a standardized system is that one will always be seeking the least-worst solution. The GT community, possibly even more than other parenting communities, ought to be aware that, as much as every success is worth celebrating, the solution may not generalize to other situations.

Honestly-- I'm going to offer a bit of an addendum. A few people who know me better more privately know the back story on this little addendum and can vouch for just how hard-won this knowledge actually is.


My DD, now nearly 17, has had a much harder time coping with being so different this year than last.

Bad things can happen to anyone-- her age didn't MAKE it happen, and it definitely didn't really impact how well she's been able to cope, let's just say that I know that statement is true by virtue of having been a college professor and having seen it unfold before.

But what I would say is that children are NOT their test results. Children are, first and foremost, individual to the core. Those idiosyncracies play together to produce absolute singularity when considering things like radical acceleration.

Now for the part that is pretty strongly opinionated.

MOST children, even PG ones, probably have no business as "regular" college students at anything under 17-18yo. Maturity is far, far more than the ability to learn quickly and solve complex problems in vector calculus.

Our daughter was well-suited to college-- I would make the same choice about acceleration again. (I'd do some other things far, far differently, but that's another story and not for this venue).

Understand that I would NOT place a child with most 2e issues, any mental health challenges whatsoever, or emotional/social deficits on a college campus while being well under 18. Would not do it. I think-- and this may be among the most judgmental things I've ever posted on this forum-- that it is distinctly unwise to do that on any campus intended for your adults who have legal autonomy and generally are busy spending that autonomy doing things that are unwise-to-downright-dumb.

The reasons are completely pragmatic. If your child becomes ill in class, nobody will walk him/her to the nurse-- they're expected to make their own way to student health or the local medical clinic. If your child experiences a roommate dispute, they have to live with the situation or negotiate a better one-- themselves. If your child is found in violation of a college policy, the college is under no obligation to notify you-- and they won't.

Kids do dumb things. They do them at 18, too. But the younger they are, the more life experience they tend to lack. The more SHELTERED or NAIVE they are, the more life experience they tend to lack.

So.

What that means, in summation, is that a 12yo who has had to work hard at high school-- spending long days keeping up with schoolwork after a radical acceleration at age 10? May not be in a good position over all to be entering college at 13 or 14. Not only will they be missing that 3-5 y that everyone around them has-- they also will not have made up much ground if they were scrambling to keep up academically rather than doing it with ease and spending a LOT of free time maturing socially and emotionally (like their older peers were doing).

On the other hand, a socially savvy child, one that is globally advanced in social/emotional maturation as well as cognitively and HAS spent that time doing what other middle- and high-schoolers have? Well, then-- yes-- maybe. But only if you have some idea what you're getting into.

Unfortunately, to some extent, I think that this die is often case back in 1st-3rd grade, and whether or not you accelerate is probably BEST determined then, when they can adjust and move with their cohort, learning the same things alongside them for almost decade.

Our daughter DID do that. She wasn't "accelerated" so much as "compressed" three years-- also sort of functionally "jumped" from being about 2-3yo to being about 5-8yo during a period of 18 months or so-- developmentally, and naturally. We didn't make that happen, it just did.

Know your child's quirks. The WORST area to be more or less synchronous in development, when considering acceleration, is probably executive function, IME. There is far more acceptance for social quirkiness or immaturity now than used to be the case. But college now is brutal for executive skills.

We knew that our daughter was going to need to be reigned in wrt dating partners being FAR TOO OLD for her. Our rule is that she can't date anyone who isn't also an undergraduate, and she hasn't tested our limits within that by dating anyone who is a returning/non-traditional student. Her friends have to understand that we're more involved with her than THEIR parents are because she is still dealing with some horrible stuff, and also because she is so young.

I also still have to push her to not procrastinate when she is feeling avoidance over her perfectionistic ways. No, I don't check her homework and haven't done a bit of that since her first year of high school. But I do regularly sniff out whether she's skipping class or turning assignments in on time.

Each and every HG+ child is a singularity. By definition. The patterns of asynchronous development that emerge in adolescence are profoundly not those of NT people-- but they are also not those of any other HG child, either.

Being PG is hard. The wrong placement can make it even harder.

For our DD, not being accelerated was the wrong choice-- I firmly believe that, seeing how she is "older" than the 18-19yo freshmen who are actually 3y older than she is... and seeing how her maturity matches best with the peers who are juniors and seniors right now, and are 20-23.

I absolutely agree that some form of acceleration is far more valuable than the tradeoffs for some children. I have first- or second-hand knowledge of an unusually high number of acceleration stories, including many radical accelerants into early college, and it is clear to me that a significant number of those individuals would have suffered loss or injury to important aspects of themselves had they not been accelerated. The costs of acceleration were well worth it for them. Those observers who believe the costs -were- too high generally have not grasped the severity of pre-acceleration psychic pain they were experiencing. These are the kinds of data captured by the longitudinal research on radical acceleration.

The main point though, is that these are group data. Just because something is good for most members of a class does not mean it is good for this member of the class. And conversely, just because many people know someone who had a bad experience with acceleration does not mean that it is damaging to every child--or to this child in particular.

We have to know our own children as multidimensional actors, trust our instincts, maintain open, sensitive, nonjudgmental communication with them and their educational environments, and be pragmatic about changing course when needs warrant. We also should be both honest and forgiving about our own past mistakes as parents; rarely were they not well meant. Own them, learn from them, deal with the consequences, and move on.

Exactly-- we can't know, any of us, what the road not taken would have brought.

Not all of the struggles in life are about acceleration or the lack of it, to be sure. But do understand that if you choose the route of acceleration, they may well be judged as such by most people.

Thank you. I really needed to read some of these comments.

I can tell a disastrous tail of a HG kid accelerated early to university that went very wrong. But the reason it didn't work was more because of bad parenting. At the time I knew the kid the parent was in it for his own glory and the kid was really miserable. It wasn't being at university at 11 that was the main problem, but how it was handled.

I think like many here I feel I struggled later in life because of easy academics early on. I want to save my son from that of course and acceleration seems like it might help. I still feel that way after reading this thread, but it is a nice reminder that it's not a simple fix that's going to cure all.

Thank you to the person that referenced "The Calculus Trap." That was a good read.

My husband entered college at 17 and had a great experience. Just another random data point.

I think this thread has strayed far from the topic.

If (IF) this squabbling couple is real, the OP wants something quite different. You may want to check out the threads by shifrbv, who appears to be the wife in question

Shifrbv has posted several times professing herself worried about her older daughters MAP testing. Apparently, their public school district has determined that a MAP score from fourth grade in the 98th percentile or above will determine eligibility for entry into an accelerated math track after fourth grade - there is no mention of grade skips, let alone multiple grade skips or early graduation and early college in any of their posts, merely the OP talking about being miserable about his own acceleration experiences. For all we know, this math track will culminate with linear algebra in 12th grade for 18 year old kids, we just don't know, it hasn't been mentioned at all.

The problem the OP really wants to talk about here (but should really talk about with his wife) is that his wife is constantly worried about any instance of the DDs MAP scores dipping or not growing along that 98th percentile curve and keeps demanding from (seemingly unresponsive) teachers that they need to teach thier DD math at the level the child needs to master (apparently that would be 6th grade maths) in order to for the DD to score at the 98th percentile at the right moment in time in fourth, and the OP disapproves of this to the extent that he has chimed in on his wife's thread, questioning her accuracy.

I am missing any mention about the child's actual academic needs, as opposed to one parents determination that the child must be eligible for the accelerated math track and the others parents disapproval of that. For all we know, the child may love 6th grade maths, and be miserable being stunted in the classroom - or be hothoused to death and be miserable with her nose kept to the grindstone.

It just sounds like a very miserable family dynamic.

The issue fundamentally is that child's academic need is very much a judgement call. Having fun in lower grades has worked perfectly well for a lot of kids but has been a disaster for others. Also measures such as NWEA MAP is a very blunt tool. So impossible to base any judgement calls based on it.

My feedback here would be to work with the school administration or to an alternate school. There is absolutely no value in fighting with them.

Possibly there is a misunderstanding? I raise that possibility because on this forum, members emphasize being positive and helping each other learn effective advocacy techniques focused on the child's needs... NOT attacking 8 teachers.

I'm sorry this is happening. In general, children may not need to complete certain specific homework only if they have a diagnosed disability, and a resultant agreement with the school (an IEP or 504) that it is in the child's best interests to reduce the specified workload.

Unfortunately, under the guise of "differentiation", teachers may not be teaching the kids who are ahead or high-achieving. Teachers may be focused on helping kids who are behind, while those who are ahead may be expected to be self-taught (auto-didactic). This is a commonly mentioned flaw of the current US public education system. One which many believe could be remedied, to a large degree, by flexible cluster grouping of students according to readiness and ability, in each subject (rather than grouping students by chronological age).

I hope that helps to clarify the information shared on the forums.

I've gathered from previous posts that the OP's child is also the child being discussed in "Disaster Grace Skip Really Need Some Help" thread, and that this is not the first public fight about their children's education.

Forget what grade your kid is in and standardized test scores. Those are trivial compared to the marital conflict she is exposed to. Get it together Mom and Dad. Talk to each other. Get a therapist for yourselves and for her to.