Well, I think that you may end up confusing the dialog when presented that way because it's a confounding of two distinct complaints. One, you want more challenging ELA curriculum in middle school. Two, you want high school credit for more challenging ELA curriculum in middle school. In my opinion, the first complaint is worthy of battle but the second is likely pointless. Your situation may be completely different as I obviously have not researched every district, but I do have personal knowledge of a number of high school districts in several states spread across the country. The number of credits required for graduation in these high schools are very minimal so that even an average student graduates with far more credits than the minimum. For example, my DS' high school only required 20 credits and he graduated with 32 without taking extra classes or summer school or earning any credits prior to high school.
Regarding the changes that you want to advocate, I am not sure that they are appropriate or sufficient. You are proposing a 1/2 year acceleration/compacting each in 6th and 7th to lead to a single year acceleration in 8th. That's not much. Why must the TAG curriculum mirror the regular curriculum? Our GT (TAG) ELA curriculum was one year ahead with enrichment during elementary school and in middle school has different curriculum altogether and higher writing expectations.
