I like to dream about what is possible in school sometimes. In reality, I pick my battles because I want to stay employed. But dreaming is good.
Ideally, instead of skipping grades, we would be accelerating along the lines of Renzulli's Compacting Curricula. I sketched out a program once--for fun--where students could take combinations of accelerated and regularly scheduled classes and finish three years of middle school in two years. They would be in at least some of their classes with students in the ballpark of their cognitive ability, and they would be taking their same age peers in smaller doses.
If they chose not to finish the program, they could fill out their schedule with more electives. If they chose to finish the program, they would enter high school a year ahead, and demonstrate all or most of the benchmarks on the way.
But the whole time, I knew it would never be implemented where I work. When I mentioned it to a teacher with a highly capable daughter, she said, "My daughter wouldn't have liked that, though." And I know that my principal considers heterogeneous grouping to be crucial to what he's trying to do. I'm waiting for the right opportunity to change his mind. Opinions are usually based on your own experiences, and that is difficult to overcome.
Enrichment is good, but enrichment is mostly much easier for schools and teachers to manage than acceleration. Pull out enrichment may provide students that critical mass of exposure to their intellectual peers, but it does not address the issue of bad work habits that students develop when they've been cruising through work that's too easy for years.
