Consequently, she appears to have no legal right to an appropriate education in the public school sector - she has no diagnosed conditions.
As some of you will be only too painfully aware, particularly with girls, standing out is not good. It invites all kinds of 'girl bullying' - telling lies and generally making the outlier miserable. This in turn, from my limited forays into the available information online, appears to trigger over excitabilities and sensitivities.
School administrators will then come along and tell you that your child has social developmental issues so insist that the child should not be accelerated. 'A child should be allowed to be a child' they pompously declare and insist that social development is more important than academic development. They then go on to tell you that you can always do more academic work outside of school hours - oblivious to the contradiction.
I am quite disheartened but do have time to organize my case. We have done the IOWA acceleration evaluation (3rd edition) and our child appears to be an excellent candidate. We had done this because we believe that the school may resist because they did not want an avalanche from other parents insisting on the same thing.
I have only seen articles that basically tell you that your child will crash and burn (or turn into a dysfunctional husk of what they could have been) if they do not get accelerated.
First, remember that even though it seems like your child has no legal right, it is actually federal law that ALL children to provided with a "free and appropriate education". (I assume that you were being sarcastic by saying she doesn't.) I have found that being able to say to a school that you know there is a federal law that provides this right is often helpful in getting their attention. Another catch phrase right now is "annual yearly progress" which basically means that each child should be able to show a year's worth of growth in an academic year, if your child's scores haven't increased enough from the beginning of this year to the end, then you can also use that as reason for acceleration - to allow her to have the opportunity to have a year's worth of growth in an academic year.
Then, explain to them that as you are working to figure out the best "appropriate education" for your DD, you would like their help via the Iowa scale.
In terms of gifted girls - we have 2 of them and the wrong academic and therefore social setting absolutely turns on the excitabilities - to maximum! We too have been told that our girls need to be allowed to be kids and everything else. In the end we confronted the administration with the contradiction in their view that we could just do more at home afterwards by explaining exactly which of her "kid activities" she'd have to give up to be after schooled. We also saw DD starting to shut down in the face of a bad academic placement, right when all of the literature said we would - at 3rd grade. It was when she told us that she was tired of pretending that she didn't use big words normally and when she was tired of having to explain everything so she just stopped talking at school that both DH and I sort of freaked out. (Being high school teachers we both have seen numerous girls with no self-confidence due to bullying in elementary and we were not going to let our daughter become another one.)
I would use the summertime getting proof together about why acceleration is good - use some of the resources either on the Davidson resource site or on Hoagies. Slowly email them to the administration throughout the summer (I guarantee they read their email over the summer.)
I know you said you were looking for examples of acceleration gone bad, but I don't have any - sorry, our acceleration was a great move for DD.
