I wrote a paper for my masters program on the information behavior of educators vis a vis acceleration and had concerns about the one sided nature of Nation Deceived (although I very much appreciate it as a resource and have given copies to a number of people). If I was going to cite/rely on a work (or suggest a book to a principal) I would use:
The Academic Acceleration of Gifted Children, edited by Southern and Jones:
http://www.amazon.com/Academic-Acceleration-Children-Education-Psychology/dp/0807730688I found their approach to be more even-handed and more likely to be accepted by educators - it is a summary of the research that is out there. And, it was published by Teachers College, Columbia University, which many educators will trust far more than a publication by a non-academic entity.
IIRC, there is in fact research that shows that adults who were skipped as children are by and large happy they were skipped, and many wish they had been skipped more years. On the other hand, there is a decent number who wish they hadn't been skipped (I can't recall the specific numbers, but I would guess in the 20% range). Many of the study participants did articulate social difficulties - they just felt on balance their academic needs were more important.
On the social side, it seems that kids who have social difficulties will have them regardless of grade, and those who don't have social difficulties will not have a problem with a skip. While we hear anecdotes about gifted kids who have a hard time with age peers but do better with older kids, this doesn't seem to actually occur all that often. What this suggests of course is that more focus should be on correct academic fit.
So much of it depends on each individual kid. My son has refused grade skips because he doesn't want to leave his crew of friends. We are lucky subject acceleration has worked pretty well. He is pretty bored in his non-accelerated subjects, but he understands the tradeoff. I feel like he understands the social repercussions very well. He is in 4th and starts the day at the middle school for math. He has to wait for school to start outside with the 7th graders and while they are nice to him, he only knows a few of them and they are not friends in a true sense. He can't wait until his friends from his own grade are also at the middle school and he has all his friends with him waiting for school to start. A small thing, but one that matters a lot to him.
