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anyone else advocating for their child in NJ. what a nightmare.
please share.

I have to say, our experiences have been extremely positive overall. Admittedly, with a 2e child, it's a very different experience. But while it may seem counter-intuitive, having gotten early intervention for our son at 2, so far we haven't had much friction from the school addressing his need for higher-level work.

We know our experience isn't necessarily "typical", but then neither are any of these children. We know (in retrospect) that we were fortunate enough to start our family in what's turned out to be one of the best school districts we could have imagined, particularly for a child who has required a lot of personal attention to address both his challenges and his gifts. But again, we've talked to other parents who've had to struggle, to get a lawyer-advocate, to really push.

For us, aside from our good fortune in where we lived, I think we were able to make things easier for us by doing our homework. The teachers, administrators, and child study teams we've met with were all able to figure out very quickly that we really know our kid, his strengths and his weaknesses, and we work hard with him.

Again, I'm not saying it's easy, or that we've always gotten what we wanted. Last year in Kindergarten, we asked several times for some sort of enrichment in math. The boy can do multiplication, division, fractional conversions to decimal, and simple algebra problems in his head, so we knew he would be hopelessly bored by Kindergarten math. It took until January for the teachers to address that he was starting to act out during math because he wasn't learning anything. Ultimately, they let him play math games on the computer during math time, so he could solve problems closer to his level. It was a start.

This year, they agreed to accelerate him to 3rd grade math. So far, it's going beautifully. True, 3rd grade math still isn't really high enough to challenge him, and the teacher has already started sending us enrichment materials to keep him busy while he waits for the class to finish. But the teacher loves him, and he enjoys the bit of "specialness" attached to doing math above his grade level...and since socially he is better off spending most of the day with his age peers right now, it's a really decent compromise.

The one thing I have gently reminded the teachers when we meet, that I remember from reading "Genius Denied", is that all children have a right to learn in school, even extremely bright ones. The principal had a moment of hesitation about the 2-year math acceleration, but my wife provided her with his IQ test scores from the previous year, and she quickly signed on.

One other blessing that certainly doesn't hurt...my wife has been a stay-at-home mom, so she volunteers at the school library a few days a week as their clerk (they lost their clerk the summer before we entered the school because of the state-wide budget cuts). There's nothing wrong with a little "you scratch my back," if you're in a position to do it. The result at the moment is a school that adores our son and very much wants to keep my wife happy.

Hope this helped a bit.

If you want more information on advocating in NJ, the lead legal counsol from NJ School Boards Assoc has agreed to address the parents at the 4th Annual HEROES Conference on Jan 14 at Rutgers - New Brunswick. Go to the HEROES web-site, www.HEROESgifted.org for registration and additional information.

NJ has had the highest standardized test scores in the nation on SAT/PSAT for several years.

If they did right by their brightest, they could blow the barn doors off even more than they currently do.

Now, that's interesting to me. Princeton, NJ being the HQ of ETS, you could call it ground zero for the notion that mass standardized test results are meaningful. As you get farther and farther from that center, as American cultures and values become more and more different from those of NJ, I would expect the test scores to also come down a bit. It geography, we would talk about that in terms of core and periphery. Hmmm.

Texas was tied with three other states as second highest last year.

There are really three sets of stats.

The "cluster" of the top end students. This is what I was referring to.

The middle average and how wide it is.

The bottom cluster and how big it is. Its pretty big in some states.

Think you've got a correlation without causation there.

Austin, the data I found says that New Jersey's scores aren't the highest (that honor seems to go to Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, and Minnesota, which all cluster together at the top. I might have missed one). Here's my source.

This is interesting: this table in USA Today (which cites the College Board as its source) shows that the states with the highest average scores tend to have the lowest percentage of students who take the SAT. The percent-taking-the-test data seems odd to me, but it's too late to start digging into it now!

It also seems that foreign students do better than American students on math (source). The grey box on the right says that some colleges game their scores by cutting foreign-student verbal scores while including their math scores. Don't know how reliable this article is, but I found an article in the NY Times from 1992 saying that foreign-student math scores were 57 points higher than US student math scores (here's the article here).

Which "American cultures and values"?

The ones derived from the French, the English, the Spanish, the Germans, or the Scotch-Irish?

I always like to point out that North America is Europe in a funhouse mirror.

If you are referring to the very low percentage of students taking the SAT in some states, I think you may be seeing the effect of regional preferences for the ACT over the SAT.

For the top end cluster:

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/13206567-post686.html