Dude I enjoyed your post on the New York Times article. A part of me wishes we lived in a area where test scores do allow for such a good education as the free gifted schools there. As I think he would successfully test into one. I think is a broken system there however.
Do you have advice from your experience. Did you grade skip your child? Have you joined the DYS?
As I say often, individual results will vary. In our case we pushed HARD for a grade skip, but we were stonewalled by an inflexible school district (yes, we took it all the way there), who has never skipped a child despite having a policy clearly spelling a skipping process out. As a result, our DD is homeschooling, and she's registered as a homeschooler at the appropriate grade level. In other words, she was in a 2nd grade class in public school, and we registered her as a 3rd grader for homeschool purposes. She moves pretty much at her own pace, and if she's being held back at all, it's because she's moving so quickly that we really don't see the need to keep her at an inordinate number of hours. She has a short school day and a lot of vacations.
Eventually, we expect to return her to public school, where we expect the grade skip will stick. We've actually met a parent already who homeschooled her child a year ahead for K, and when she went to register her for public school as a 1st grader, the school accepted her, despite the fact that this directly conflicts with the written district policy for accepting K and 1st grade students.
Honestly, I wonder why they bother writing and publishing policies in the first place.
That's our story. We'd have made any number of different choices if some of the many variables involved had been different, though, which is why I qualify any advice based on individual experiences. Here's a sample list of some variable changes that would likely have led us to a different outcome:
- If the district was more open to grade skipping.
- If the in-grade-level-class differentiation the school touted so much actually happened.
- If the daily shuttling between a GT class and a grade level class didn't create a chaotic mess of a learning environment.
- If the district had a magnet GT school where DD could be in a GT class all day.
- If a private GT school were an option in my area.
- If DW had to work, and homeschooling was not an option.
