I love the "logic" of the article. According to the author, the findings of a "A Nation Deceived" are suspect even though they are based on "hundreds of studies that have been conducted on academic acceleration, and most show no negative emotional outcomes for accelerated students" because they are "based on subjective reporting by the students themselves, a notoriously inaccurate and blunt research tool."
The author refutes decades of research with the personal observations of a columnist, a fifth grade teacher and one woman who was unhappy about her grade skip as child. Hundreds of subjective studies outweighed by three individual subjective opinions. Hmmm.
I am so glad that this column did not appear last week when administrators at DD's school were weighing her skip. She is a great candidate under the IAS and really wants the skip but one of the administrators could have written this same article. "What about social problems? What about middle school?" He was adamant that no child should ever be skipped because of these factors. Ultimately he was overruled but it is so frustrating to try to fight such continually perpetuated bias, conventional wisdom and shibboleths.
