Agree with moomin- there are absolutely well-known-but-not-openly-discussed differences in teachers/classrooms here, too. There are a few teachers who excel in differentiation, and the classes, while certainly not mimicking a self-contained class, are skewed towards a certain population/student type. And yes, we missed out on the first obvious example of this (my dd kept complaining that all her friends were in x class). That year was our worst, and I now suspect that the admin feels somewhat guilty about misplacing dd; at any rate, she and her younger sib have benefitted and have since had quite good teacher placements, often grouped with other highly gifted kids (finally, this after elementary where they intentionally "spread these kids around" to ostensibly keep everything equal in everyone's eyes.) And clearly, there is no way this could be written down, or probably even acknowledged openly, at least in our district. You are not allowed to ask for specific teachers, etc, due to the competitive aggressive parenting.
