I can imagine that the school/teacher finds the class clown role to be troublesome. And bored/unengaged kids (much less bored/unengaged gifted kids) will often goof off or around to have something to do.
This is the sort of thing that some form of ability test might help with. Depending on the relative scores, a gifted magnet school might be drawing in a large number of students that are at the lower levels of gifted. Loosely speaking, a 145 is as far from a 123 as that 123 is from 100. So to the extent that a moderately gifted child can be unengaged in a normally paced classroom, so to is it possible for a highly gifted child to be unengaged in a moderately gifted paced class.
A few quick thoughts: A very good score on an iq test might open the discussion to some level of acceleration. The Iowa Acceleration Scale is more designed for acceleration decisions in a regular school environment, but I could see using it's format in a gifted magnet school. Moving to higher level classes might help with the boredom issue by adding back in more challenge.
