Once a week pull out programs may or may not meet the needs of gifted children - depends on what the child's needs are. Some schools will administer an individual IQ test (usually WISC IV) which might give a fuller picture of what is going on.
There are sort of 2 possiblities here -
1) the teacher/school stinks and isn't meeting anyone's educational needs
2) The teacher/school is good for most kids, but your daughter has special educational needs in the gifted directions that wouldn't be expected to be met in the regular classroom.
It's hard to know which of these will sound worse to the Principal. Try to organize your thoughts into those two possibilities and make a list of your concerns that point to either direction. Then decide which approach you want to take, and be sure to stress your concerns from that list when you meet with the Principal.
Ability grouping is wonderful thing, and is within the Principal's domain. You may find that if you argue the social-emotional need angle, the Principal may set up a little experiment where she 'stacks the deck' and puts a bunch of gifted girls with a teacher who is already good at differentiating.
I don't know if differentiated instruction is universally accepted as a best practice, but I do know it is very difficult,and time consuming, and hard to teach a teacher to do - so I would rather try and hand pick teachers who are already good at this or move my child to a classroom where what is being taught is close to his readiness level, than to storm the school demanding that every teacher be trained in differentiating.
I've seen several classrooms where the teachers look me full in the face and state that they are providing differentiated instruction and shown me stuff that would have bored my son 2 years previous. Based strictly on my personal observation, when differentiated instruction is taught to teachers, pretesting to find out what the child is read to learn isn't part of the package. Again - so many adults feel comfortable in 'assuming' what 'normal development' will be, so that a particular age of a child can be proxy for their readiness level. Often I've seen differentiation presented as "But I do differentiation! Here's the lesson for visual learners and here it is for hands on learners."
As you can see, I'm 'once bitten, twice shy' about differentiation, and the first question I ask when being told that all my son's needs will be taken care of that way is: 'So how will it be determined what my son's educational needs are?'
So I'm re-reading that the school has about 400 kids. If your daughter's verbal ability is truly 99.9% for your neighborhood, then by the odds, there shouldn't even be one other kid in the whole school with verbal ability as unusual as your daughters.
It does sound like she is missing opportunities to develop good study habits, and that she is already learning the lesson that 'school' and 'learning' are two seperate worlds.
Bottom line: See if the school will do some more testing to find out where she is, and look into subject acceleration so that she gets to learn for some part of each day in school. Teacher selection can go a long way, and 'stacking the deck' for social emotional needs might be something the Principle is willing to go along with. Look for summer programs that will get your DD with kids she can 'talk' to.
Love and More Love,
Grinity
