You know all this, but here it is for your DH...
Pre-K #1: age 3, he was in a half-day, non-academic pre-K 3 afternoons per week. Socially that seemed to work great, but it certainly wasn't stretching him academically.
Pre-K #2: a 5-afternoon per week class, and though the director had promised me that DS #1, who was reading books quite well by then (age 4), would be able to go at his own pace without all the pre-reading things he'd mastered literally half his life ago...they didn't do what they promised. In fact, they thought he was *behind* in reading because he never used the language arts area...never ever! I advocated gently, and they ignored. I was frustrated.
In January, we had our conference and DH was NOT gentle with his advocacy. The school finally (and very reluctantly) agreed to skip the first pre-reading step that DS #1 flat refused to do. Once they skipped that, he did a week's worth of stuff in 20 minutes or so, and they were finally sold. He *raced* through the curriculum after that, and was the sole child in the school allowed to read books only once and get checked off for them. They knew that if he read it once, he could probably repeat it to them verbatim. Still, I felt like we paid a whole lot of $$$ for a school that had really pulled a bait-and-switch on us and just didn't get him...
Even so, he was happy, he loved school, and he did well socially.
K--half-day, non-academic, public--went pretty well because he had the first teacher who got him. She should be the poster child for effective differentiation, because she was able to give him slightly different directions than the norm and yet make the assignments much more appropriate to his needs. He took great pride in his perfect behavior record, and admonished other kids who weren't doing what they should be doing. He continued to enjoy school thoroughly and had friends there. However, he began to say things like "I'm the smartest kid in my class." This worried me.
His K teacher is the one who recommended him for GT testing in the spring of K, and it was when I saw these scores (not until fall of 1st grade) that I realized that DS #1 was not "just" MG.
1st grade: His first foray into a full-day, academic classroom. It wasn't pretty!
The differentiation he'd received in K meant that he was well ahead of 1st grade curriculum, yet this 1st grade teacher didn't differentiate. In effect, he was being held back because he'd had a good teacher followed by a bad one.
He came home the first day of school, threw down his backpack and said, "I'm not going back there again. And if you MAKE me go back to 1st grade, then there's no WAY I'm going to 2nd because it will be even LONGER and MORE BORING!!!" He was miserable, cranky, acting out in class and at home. When he didn't pay attention or acted out because he was so thoroughly frustrated, his teacher took recesses away, which devastated DS and left him feeling like he was a bad kid. The change in him was dramatic and immediate. There was no doubt that underchallenge was the cause.
To top it off, he didn't seem to have friends at school anymore. No one wants to play with an angry, frustrated kid. And he was becoming a perfectionist, so anything hard for him--like kickball or basketball--set him off. He was isolated and unhappy, clearly a child at risk.
I e-mailed the teacher expressing my concerns about his bad behavior in school and supporting her. This was my "I'm on your team" e-mail. I got back a long and defensive e-mail that made it clear that she thought I was out of line. She said she felt that I had no confidence in her ability to teach DS. I sent an apology, taking full responsibility for what must have been a misunderstanding...I got no response, no acknowledgement. Nothing. I volunteered in class that week, and she said nothing to me about it.
DH and I spun our wheels trying to decide what to do. Go to the principal? Well, if she felt undermined by me, that would only make it worse. Agitate to get him into a different class? Well, without a grade skip, we feared more of the same, and that wouldn't be worth the trouble it would take to get him out of that class. Grade skip? Well, if the school would even allow a skip--a big if!--we weren't sure that a grade skip was right for him. (I think it might have worked for him, now that I know more about grade skips. But at the time, it looked like DS might want to play football, and he'll need the time to mature if that's the case, especially given the number of red-shirted kids in our area.)
Truly, I felt like this teacher was holding our whole family hostage. We had no acceptable alternative.
Then we considered homeschooling, and the clouds parted. Yes! In this way we could go deeper rather than faster if we wanted to, so DS wouldn't have to be bored, but he also could return to school at age level in middle or high school, when more challenging classes became available, and sports would work fine.
The decision was made easy for us when we (finally!) saw his K scores on the WJ-III achievement test, and we realized that even without any real special attention, either at home or at school, he was performing at DYS levels. That cinched it--our particular school was unlikely to be able to serve him regardless of what we did. And my two brushes with advocacy had been so deeply unpleasant and ineffective that I just couldn't imagine going through all it would take to even make a little progress toward what he needed. Homeschooling was our answer.
And what an answer! His attitude and behavior reverted to their former level literally the day he didn't have to go to that class. It was an immediate change. And now that I have sufficient childcare time so that I'm not going insane (!), HSing is working like a charm. It's been hard sometimes to find ways to go deeper rather than faster at the elementary school level, but I am getting better at it the longer we do it. We're doing things like reading about archeology and codes and engineering, things that he wouldn't get any chance to study in school at all. This seems to work better for slowing him down while keeping him interested than anything else I've tried. It's hard to go deeper with times tables and addition...
He's loving geometry (complete with theorems and a soft approach to proofs, since logic works well with him), and he reads whatever interests him and no one tells him to stick to the "little kid" section of the library. He's back to the easygoing kid who makes friends easily--even kids his own age.
It was a rough road, but we've found the right path at last!
