Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Grade skips and future competitiveness

Okay- so this is one that comes up quite a lot around here.

It certainly seems like a wholly valid concern. Will my HG child still be able to shine--enough/as s/he should-- when it comes time in middle and high school for the outside world to start measuring and assigning achievement percentiles??

Is it going to "cost" my child status which would/should rightfully be his/hers?

This really worries some parents.

Well, I decided to start this thread because similar (or related) conversation comes up a LOT at the beginnings/ends of the school year for fairly obvious reasons.

Pro-skip:
Child needs more appropriate academic setting NOW or is at risk of failure-- ergo the distant future isn't even a consideration.

The skip can be "un-done" at the break between middle and high school if you decide at that point that being 95th percentile isn't "good enough."

Anti-skip:

There is a huge difference between 99th percentile on the SAT/ACT and where that will take a student... versus 90th percentile. If a skip (ideally) moves a child into his/her proximal zone and keeps him/her there-- that 90th percentile SHOULD be about where they score.

For the purposes of college admissions and merit scholarship money, that's simply not good enough unless you happen to qualify for other reasons (minority status, low SES) that make you a desirable diversity admit.

Colleges may NOT be pleased about a 13, 14, 15, 16-yo matriculant, and may in fact want that student to look BETTER than his/her academic peer cohort on paper. (We've recently run into this in a few places.)

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Now, with that said, something that most of us who have done skips have noticed also occurs to me.

Recall that HG+ kids are not just "advanced" they are on a different cognitive trajectory entirely.

If you 'jump' a child like that into an appropriate level of challenge which is still intended for neurotypical peers, the fit isn't going to be ideal for long.

We've discovered that, in fact, when you're dealing with an EG/PG child, a single skip only "helps" for about a year. At most. Then the fit gets bad again. It's like growing a Giant Sequoia in a series of pots intended for begonias and other houseplants.

In our experience you're far more likely to encounter problems in maturity/asynchrony than in performance/challenge-- in the long run, that is.

Why? Because they adjust to the increased demand, sending out rootlets and filling up the pot you put them in until it gets "small" again. Like a Sequoia. What this means, functionally, is that most EG/PG kids, even multiply grade accelerated, are STILL going to be capable of wowing on standardized tests. They still rise to the new boundary condition, basically.

DD13, then a high school junior, scored 99th percentile on both her PSAT and her SAT. Now, it is true that she scored just out of national-merit range. She had a not-so-great day. [shrug] But truthfully, that could have happened to her at 15 or 16, too.


It's definitely a balancing act.

But stop to consider-- really consider-- your child's tolerance for another however-many-years of far-below level work and then ask yourself if your child is still going to be knocking out stratospheric standardized test scores if they've spent the previous decade dumbing down, blending in, and tuning out.

Some kids, maybe so.

Others, not-so-much.

Thanks for starting this thread. It is still a question that comes up for me. I am not really concerned about my child's competitiveness post-skip in his class at his school. I am somewhat concerned about how he does compared to other GT kids who take certain tests or participate in talent searches or competitions. For example, if we had not skipped our son, his Explore tests would have been much more impressive, but since he is compared with others who took the test in his grade, some of whom have not been skipped, there is a difference. My kiddo is just 9 now and doesn't care much if anything about Explore or other tests at this stage, so I'm not really concerned about it that much. But it is something to consider.

Our DD8 made it quickly apparent that the answer to that question was an emphatic "NO!" when, three weeks into K, she decided that she didn't remember how to write an "M" anymore. She'd already been writing on every loose scrap of paper for the previous two years.

DD has skipped into 4th grade this year, and I'm quite delighted that she's not bringing home aces on every paper, because it shows that she's being challenged. I do expect her to rise to the challenge as the year goes on.

Last night she brought home a pile of papers, and one was a writing assignment with a well-deserved F.

If they aren't challenged, they may barely grow.

I don't agree with the conclusion that a kid in a sub-optimal learning situation would do better on say an Explore test at 13, then they would at 12 while having been in a closer to optimal learning situation. Now if they had an extra year in an optimal environment, then sure. But the presumption is we skip because that optimal opportunity doesn't exist.

We have only recently come across a problem that we hadn't anticipated in advance of the grade skip. In math competitions, like Math Olympiad or elementary Math League, DS is competing with other gifted kids. Last year, he would have won an award at the state level for scores as a 5th grader, but because of the skip, he is a 6th grader. So he missed out by two points. As a gifted 5th grader, he still knocked the socks off of the competition. Because some families locally are huge in red shirting, he was competing against kids that were two, sometimes three years older and also gifted.

Yep. We're just now learning about that, first-hand.

We sent DD8 to 4th grade with the advice to keep her age to herself, because nobody would know she was only 8 unless she told them, and we want her to be able to blend in. Her homeroom teacher "outed" her within the first few days... so much for that strategy. DD thinks that led to another girl beginning to bully her. One day when DD was shoved in the hallway, she made an appeal to another teacher standing nearby, who said something to the effect of, "We don't like tattle-tales in fourth grade. If you don't like it, you can go back to third."

Leaving that story incomplete would be a disservice to the school, so, when the situation with that girl escalated to the point where DD felt ready to report it to her parents, I emailed the teachers involved, and the responses were appropriate and consistent with their self-professed policy of zero tolerance for bullying.

But yeah... great attitude, staff.

I guess I want to clarify what I meant by talking about my son's Explore scores. If I look at his scores he got as a grade-skipped 4th grader, but compared them to the 3rd graders who took the test (my son by age should have been a 3rd grader when he took the test), then his scores look a lot better. Of course I can't say that he would have gotten the same scores if he had not skipped in the first place, but who knows.

And unfortunately without running live experiments on our kids or do-over time machines, we don't know. So I'd take the perspective that he got his best score possible in this scenario with the possibility that he might've had a higher percentile ranking if he had been retained but also likely a lower score (whether motivational or simply lack of access to more advanced material.)

I also don't want to fight and embrace ageism at the same time. (Though I am quite certain once DS does some Explore like test, I'll be cross-comparing against age vs. grade.)

That's why I posted about DD, in fact. She was capable of a "perfect" score on under ideal conditions, probably.

She did do VERY well on the SAT-- just not perfect, and not as well as she did on practice exams.

But that could have happened to her regardless of age, honestly. The point is that at 13 she was in that elite category of "potential perfect scorers." Which means that she's in the 99th percentile when compared with 16-19yo's.

Not all of them WILL do it on any given day, either.

Too many other factors, like being tired, nervous, ill, anxious over something else, etc.

I admit to wrestling with this a little, but on a slightly different scale. DS5 is a great skip candidate in almost every way, except that if we skipped him to 1, next year he would go up into a full-day gifted magnet. He would still be ready for this (I know because my DD is in the magnet) except for writing, where he would be quite far down at the low end. It would surely be a struggle for him, and I really do worry that setting a 6yo male second grader up to fear or dislike writing (in an environment where kids are expected to be with the program or...well, not, especially because it is a high-expectations, opt-in program and he has no LDs) is a bad idea.

His K teacher actually even brought up skipping to us (in fact, skipping to a 1/2 multiage, which they have, was her thought) but I said I didn't think it was a good idea because of the writing. She deferred because she teaches gen ed and doesn't know the program, and also said the school principal would likely not support a skip. Now I am wondering--uh, the teacher brought up a skip in the 3rd week of school and I said no? But DS can just kinda write a somewhat legible sentence. His spelling is definitely pretty out there still. Punctuation is usually not there. My dd9 entered 2nd writing beautiful, cohesive paragraphs. She was at the high end, but so were plenty of kids.

If DS5 is writing really nicely at the end of K, then maybe....