first priority should be compaction/acceleration
Why?
It's an honest question-- I'm just not sure that I understand what goal this accomplishes in and of itself that makes it PREFERABLE to depth/challenge/complexity. I understand that acceleration is a strategy which can help to ease a poor fit given asynchronous development, but I'm curious to know if there is some larger benefit that I've overlooked. I tend to see it as a least-worst issue, not as a good goal by any means. If anything, we've come down squarely on the other side of this issue (surprise, surprise, I'm sure, in light of DD's 3+ years of acceleration)-- it's just been our experience that more SUITABLE instruction is better by far than more "advanced" instruction, which usually comes with expectations which may be something less than age-appropriate or developmentally suitable in other ways. (That is, a 7yo may not possess the attention span expected of even "average" 12yo children, and it doesn't seem-- to me-- to be a good idea to treat a 8yo PG student as if s/he were interchangeable with a 16yo NT one.)
Of course the cynic in me suggests that one possible answer to my question is that this is a strategy which limits the child's years of exposure to educators, particularly at the primary and early secondary levels, where pedagogy may be particularly ill-suited to such children.
