Okay- so this is one that comes up quite a lot around here.
It certainly seems like a wholly valid concern. Will my HG child still be able to shine--enough/as s/he should-- when it comes time in middle and high school for the outside world to start measuring and assigning achievement percentiles??
Is it going to "cost" my child status which would/should rightfully be his/hers?
This really worries some parents.
Well, I decided to start this thread because similar (or related) conversation comes up a LOT at the beginnings/ends of the school year for fairly obvious reasons.
Pro-skip:
Child needs more appropriate academic setting NOW or is at risk of failure-- ergo the distant future isn't even a consideration.
The skip can be "un-done" at the break between middle and high school if you decide at that point that being 95th percentile isn't "good enough."
Anti-skip:
There is a huge difference between 99th percentile on the SAT/ACT and where that will take a student... versus 90th percentile. If a skip (ideally) moves a child into his/her proximal zone and keeps him/her there-- that 90th percentile SHOULD be about where they score.
For the purposes of college admissions and merit scholarship money, that's simply not good enough unless you happen to qualify for other reasons (minority status, low SES) that make you a desirable diversity admit.
Colleges may NOT be pleased about a 13, 14, 15, 16-yo matriculant, and may in fact want that student to look BETTER than his/her academic peer cohort on paper. (We've recently run into this in a few places.)
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Now, with that said, something that most of us who have done skips have noticed also occurs to me.
Recall that HG+ kids are not just "advanced" they are on a different cognitive trajectory entirely.
If you 'jump' a child like that into an appropriate level of challenge which is still intended for neurotypical peers, the fit isn't going to be ideal for long.
We've discovered that, in fact, when you're dealing with an EG/PG child, a single skip only "helps" for about a year. At most. Then the fit gets bad again. It's like growing a Giant Sequoia in a series of pots intended for begonias and other houseplants.
In our experience you're far more likely to encounter problems in maturity/asynchrony than in performance/challenge-- in the long run, that is.
Why? Because they adjust to the increased demand, sending out rootlets and filling up the pot you put them in until it gets "small" again. Like a Sequoia. What this means, functionally, is that most EG/PG kids, even multiply grade accelerated, are STILL going to be capable of wowing on standardized tests. They still rise to the new boundary condition, basically.
DD13, then a high school junior, scored 99th percentile on both her PSAT and her SAT. Now, it is true that she scored just out of national-merit range. She had a not-so-great day. [shrug] But truthfully, that could have happened to her at 15 or 16, too.
It's definitely a balancing act.
But stop to consider-- really consider-- your child's tolerance for another however-many-years of far-below level work and then ask yourself if your child is still going to be knocking out stratospheric standardized test scores if they've spent the previous decade dumbing down, blending in, and tuning out.
Some kids, maybe so.
Others, not-so-much.
