Deny a gifted child's academic and intellectual needs for long enough and the gifted child may tend to underachieve academically. Two thoughts:
1) From the outside, it may appear that this child no longer presents with a need for intellectual stimulation, advanced curriculum, or accelerated pacing. To the schools being measured by their ability to close achievement gaps, this may be counted as a success.
2) From the inside, this may create a child who has been deeply invalidated, ignored, overlooked, underserved, and treated as inconsequential collateral damage. This child's growth may not continue along a positive academic path, as the child may have lost curiosity, drive, and internal motivation, and may be scarred with a deep distrust of the system. Voila! The system may have now created the social miscreant which it projected onto this gifted child: a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is a reason why groups like SENG (Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted) exist, and why parents pull their children from schools.
I want to do a Martin Luther and post this on our school board's door.
