I think it is true for most education systems that elementary school has to be endured, and if possible, compressed in the shortest possible time, but by middle school, things do have to fall into place - options open up, but expectations have to be met.
When I went to school, elementary school (grade 1-6) was followed by two years of junior high school, in which most academic classes were tracked. Nowadays junior high schools have been mostly replaced by "middle schools" (grades 608), which are mostly untracked and may be worse than elementary school for gifted children. The differences in mental ages of students in an untracked 8th grade English class will be larger than in an untracked 1st grade English class.
