The thing is, these types of articles are written for the audience of MG and lower children/parents. The fact is that there are just too few HG+/PG kids to really dedicate an article to them in a general population magazine. For the gifted coordinators, the article rings true. Their job is really to educate those in the mid-upper ends, but not the extreme ends. No gifted program is, long term, really going to meet a PG child's needs. They will outgrow it, or at least need multiple skips.
But as to my own experience, DS6 has an average to MG friend. (Honestly I have no idea where he is, but parent's think he is bright. Seeing him through the comparative lense of my own son, I have a harder time seeing it...not that it isn't there.) Friend's grandma is a gifted-ed teacher. Friend's mom has made comments before about evening out in third grade, and other views she got from her mom, the grandmother. BUT, she also, of her own will (I wasn't arguing at all) said, "oh, but this obviously doesn't apply to your DS...he is on a different level." So it might be that a lot of people believe these statements, but only when applied to the median. They subconsciously lop off the end members, and just expect that we intuitively know we are NOT talking about the extremes. But for the kids who are really well served by the gifted programs, kids who are MG, there is more sense in these statements. It is probably harder to tell them apart from well prepped kids who have had three years of academic preschool. Those kids darn-well better be at the top of the K class, as they've had three years of the same curriculum over and over. Take a well prepped average kid who has had three years of academic pre-school and place them with an MG kid with no prep, and it very well could be hard for a teacher of 30 to be able to know them well enough to sort it out until third grade.
My point is that I don't think we need to take insult at this. We don't need to assume that every article written about gifted education is about profoundly gifted education. If schools had PG programs, they would be awfully lonely classrooms.
