MumofThree, I don't know that it is so much that I am disagreeing with you as realizing that there is no way to place a child who is many, many grades ahead of level in many areas at his/her instructional level and, even if there was, in order to do so, you'd wind up with putting a little kid in high school or beyond and also risking having said child have fewer opportunities as a result.
For instance, having our dd be about a year and half younger than the average kid in her grade and as much as 2+ yrs younger than some, already puts her in the position where we are not absolutely positive that she'll qualify for things like, say, National Merit semi-finals. If she were an 8th or 9th grader this year, rather than a 10th grader, all she'd have to do is show up for the PSAT in her junior year and she'd pretty much be a shoo in for NMSF. While she's pretty consistently testing at the 99th percentile on tests that give a clue as to how she'll do on the PSAT, it is possible that she'll have an "off" day and fall just a tad short.
I wouldn't *not* accelerate a kid at all in order to ensure that she wins competitions, is the valedictorian, or gets scholarships, but it is something that is in the back of my mind as we get toward the end of this K-12 journey. We've compromised. Dd is placed appropriately, like I mentioned, in her weakest subject. In her other subjects, she is placed more appropriately than she would be had she not been accelerated, but she's never really been placed at her instructional level in those areas. The quantity alone, though, of higher level work makes it such that she's busy and couldn't do more without feeling overwhelmed and without sacrificing a life outside of school.
Yes. Our DD13 is just a year ahead of Cricket's and this is precisely the trade-off we've made. She is likely to
not make the cut as a national merit scholar because she had a less-than-stellar outing that particular morning, basically. Still 99th percentile, and we recently found out she's in the top 50K nationwide, but honestly, with her
age cohort, she'd be more like the top
50. It's just that there is no way that we could have flexed everything else enough to keep her from severe mental health problems in the interim.
Don't get me wrong-- she's still a "stellar" student, and looks that way even if one takes her age completely out of the equation and just examines her as an 11th grader. It's just that she looks like "Ivy material" and not slack-jawed "WOW." When she sets her mind to something, though, there is a
question of success... not the assumption of it. Personally, we tend to think that is a better thing in the long run.
KWIM?
As I've highlighted in bold, the real problem is that a PG child simply
cannot really be placed in a routine schooling environment with true peers-- and even if they could, each of those peers has an individual profile of idiosyncratic asynchronous development that rapidly makes group instruction impossible anyway. It's a no-
win situation, and you have to make the least-worst choices with the individual child in mind.
For us, that was three skips with early entry and other differentiation tricks like enrichment, GT/advanced coursework, and home instructional environment. For another child, it would be a different mix.
