When we were looking at school, we visited a highly sought after "option school" within our district. It is a lottery school and has some of the highest state testing scores in the district. People self-select for this school so it is hard to know what is a function of involved parents versus the actual curriculum. They used Open Court reading. I witnessed one mind-numbing session and vowed that I would never subject my kids to that curriculum.

My kids seem fairly content in their gt classrooms within a regular neighborhood school. My kids enjoy their peer group and general community. They use various curricula developed for gifted programs. I don't know if they would feel the same way if they were in traditional classrooms. I do agree that the two weeks of onerous standardized testing are sheer torture.