Familiar with up to four years of successful acceleration, full grade-skip may be regarded by schools as a last resort, because schools may be reluctant to forego the tuition and/or tax dollars which they receive per pupil per year of enrollment.
The often-reported lament that one grade skip is not sufficient as children may tend to outpace the curriculum in subsequent grade levels gives rise to the proposal that students be flexibly cluster-grouped by readiness and ability in each subject, without regard to chronological age (or "grade level"), into courses of appropriate placement and pacing.
Practices such as MAP testing may ease placement decisions, facilitating acceleration. Practices of evaluating teachers/schools/districts based upon standardized test results may work against acceleration because these are tied to a pupil's grade level; Advanced students, when denied acceleration, are believed to boost the standard test scores of a class and therefore reflect positively on a teacher/school/district. AT WHAT COST TO THE GIFTED STUDENTS, who may be disregarded as collateral damage.
The Iowa Acceleration Scale remains the gold standard in putting issues on the table to discuss the likelihood of a successful acceleration.
