Well, if you look at a bell curve it should really just be a no brainer, right? The middle 40% or 50 %so, in the average +/- 10 IQ range, correctly placed with a "grade level" (ie average) curriculum. About 25% to 30%on each side of the curve, give or take a few, a year up or down from "grade level".
Maybe. I'm not sure. The IQ range for the 70th to 75th percentiles is
108 - 111. While I understand that IQ tests are flawed and there's more to academic ability than IQ, the reality is that these scores are solidly in the average range. The definition of a concept like acceleration is that it's something for people who are
different. There is nothing wrong with average ability in a subject area, but it still isn't
different. People of average ability don't make the varsity team in 8th or 9th grade (a sports equivalent of acceleration).
I've already written up some suspicions I have about the claims that millions of children would benefit from acceleration. While I never got around to answering the replies to what I wrote, I'm still suspicious. I also can't help but wonder if the need to skip ahead could be due more to slowing the pace and keeping content superficial to ensure that the lowest performers pass the high-stakes tests.
If we get overly inclusive and claim that 30% or more of students need acceleration, we create a situation that still completely fails to challenge gifted kids appropriately, because the accelerated/GATE/whatever classes will be serving kids who are above the average only in the purely pedantic sense that 108 > 100.
The obvious solution is to group each subject by ability and not lower standards in any of the groups. This might mean magnet-type schools for kids with IQs at least 2 SDs above the average that, themselves, would be ability-grouped by subject.
