Right on all counts-- make no mistake, we are most emphatically NOT sorry for doing acceleration...
and I'll also add that (IMO) the most crucial time to make that fit better is
early. That's when kids are learning what school is for, more or less. If they learn that it is about compliance, punishment, socializing with others, being a teacher's aide, and NOT about trying one's best and learning, that is a disaster that can be awful to remediate later. It's also when children who have mastery of basic numeracy and literacy can spend the greatest percentage of their time bored; the gap is widest then. In an eerie coincidence, this is also when they develop a reputation for 'problem behaviors' in some classrooms. Bored 6yo's trapped in inappropriate learning environments don't have the same kind of impulse control and maturity that bored adults do when trapped in mind-numbing meetings. Or maybe they just don't have access to smartphones.
DD13's gradeskips worked (relatively well-- as cricket and kcab both note, we've traded really-bad problems for other problems, basically) because we were working with a set of school administrators and teachers who ARE flexible and helpful. Mostly. When we've had one or two who aren't, it really shows us just how horrific it
would be without that bit of things. That's why I'm so confident in stating that if your school takes the outlook that acceleration = "our work here is finished, now go forth and prosper" then it may not work very well.
One trade, though, is that my DD appears (on paper, at least and increasingly in person) to be a fairly typical, high-achieving MG/HG junior in HS. She does
not necessarily 'appear' to be what she actually IS; a PG kid doing amazing quality work four to six years beyond what her age would predict even for most GT kids, and struggling mightily with ongoing asynchrony. One additional reason for this is that it is
still the case that the work is simply not "appropriate" in terms of pacing and depth, though it's quite high in terms of output demands (busywork, mostly). She probably
won't get a perfect 2400 on her SAT's this spring, and probably narrowly missed NMSF levels in our state-- meh. That's a trade-off. She's in the 95th-99th percentile pretty regularly, not the 99.99th because of the acceleration, but on the other hand, without it, she'd be so completely shut down that she wouldn't
appear to be at that higher level anyway. It's obvious; she does paradoxically more sloppy and thoughtless work on easier tasks.
Kids who
need the acceleration are often caught in something of a no-win situation. Because doing
nothing for them certainly isn't better than giving them something more appropriate to do, but acceleration also isn't
entirely "giving them appropriate" things to do. The fit might be
better, which isn't to say that it's actually going to be
good, or that you will have improved everything without worsening anything.
This is why the IAS is important, and it's also why schools look at some subscores carefully. Individual areas of strength and weakness can interact with different curricula in pretty predictable ways, and often the school is in the best position to know what obstacles lie ahead in that path.
As Kcab notes, having the discussions is generally a good thing, because it definitely provides much-needed information for everyone no matter what happens.
