Last year, my DD was in 3rd grade and the school was using a push-in model for GT (in 1st and 2nd grade it had been pull-out). I thought at the time it was a dismal failure. This year we got a new GT teacher who seemed open to parent involvement so I volunteered once a week to help with 4th grade GT kids, and it was back to the pull-out model. I also helped file student paperwork in the regular classroom and got a sense of the abilities of her classmates.
Things I noticed:
Not all the GT kids struck me as really GT. There are 25 kids ID'd as GT out of 87 4th graders - almost 29% of her grade?! And yet, based on classroom work I saw as well as knowing some kids outside of school, there were some kids not in GT who I thought could be. I'm not privy to testing details.
The classroom teacher was cooperative about the pull-outs but I could tell she was not happy about them. Sometimes the class would be in the middle of a fun, interactive hands-on activity, and I hated pulling the GT kids away from something like that because that's exactly the kind of stuff I think they should be doing. (So I wasn't the most efficient volunteer sometimes.)
The pull-out activities were engaging, but not at all connected to what the class was doing, so the GT kids were doing extra, unrelated work in addition to whatever they were missing in class.
Because of the high number of GT kids, each kid might have gotten 10 minutes of face time with the GT teacher every 3-4 weeks. In this case, pull-out was really not an enriching experience except for what each kid did on their own time working on their GT project.
I know that last year with the push-in model, my DD didn't see any distinction in being GT because in her eyes there was nothing different being done for GT kids vs. non-ID'd GT kids. This year, she definitely felt there was a difference.
The GT teacher signed up the school for a math competition, and it was open to anyone who wanted to do it, GT or not. 3 out of 8 of the Honorable Mention winners in DD's grade were not GT kids. And I know the parents of those 3 are not hot-housing parents.
So I'm left with mixed feelings about push-in vs pull-out, at least the version that exists in our school. Our school district had an external review regarding how our gifted services measured up to the state regulations, and was found deficient in programming, evaluation, accountability, and personnel (honestly no surprise there).
