Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Crazy question about report cards

My son attends a public school program for homeschoolers. He attends class two afternoons each week. He is in the 3rd grade and has had the same teachers since kindergarten. He has always gotten the equivalent of "exceeds expectations" on his report cards for every single parameter.

In December I approached the school about the possibility of some subject acceleration in the classes he has there because he was becoming extremely unhappy with the level of the work (he works on a solid 6th-7th grade level across the board at home with the exception of his writing stamina). They ended up denying the acceleration.

I just got his report card for the first semester, and it has several areas where he is not meeting expectations on it. This is the first I've heard of any problems.

Am I being paranoid to think that my request for subject acceleration has something to do with this?

I don't think you are being paranoid, but it might not be that this is punitive on the part of the school. It might be that your child is getting bored. I'd say that both are likely. I'd schedule a conference with the teacher.

I would say it could be, but could also be that they know what your DC is capable of and he is losing interest and underachieving also. Either way, it needs to be looked into and addressed.

We had something similar happen last year when DS was in second grade. We starting advocating for subject acceleration in math and went over the teacher's head in early spring. He had never had an "at grade level" score in math (we have below, at and above grade level on our report cards) and at the end of the year he had a "at grade level" for addition and subtraction math facts of all things. It was funny, because I had all his math fact tests at home which were perfect, with maybe 2 errors over the entire year. Even more amusing was that he had just been given the 3rd, 4th and 5th grade end of year math tests by the district and nailed the 3rd and 4th and tested at about 70 percent on the 5th (hence he is now in 5th grade math).

Since it was the end of the year, and we had received the acceleration, we decided not to pursue it. We decided that the possible reasons were:
1. retaliation- albeit we think it was subconscious
2. cluelessness - this teacher always went on and on about how DS wasn't the "fastest" in the class at math facts
3. mistaken identity- there was another child in the class with his same first name and my DS says she always was mixing up their papers. . .

It wouldn't have been so amusing if the school had denied our request for acceleration. If I was in your position I would schedule a conference and then at that conference demand (but in a very nice, asking kind of way) that they test him on end of year materials and see what he knows. If you can get them to agree that he should be working at the appropriate level, you can sometimes trap them into agreeing to the testing (it worked for us).

Good luck, let us know how it goes.

Sadly - no!
It takes a very 'big' person not to pull this. It may not be 'retaliation' but more of 'cover your backside' sort of thing.
Best Wishes,
Grinity

It's very possible. But it's also very possible that the teacher is not doing it on purpose. When I was teaching high school, I occasionally had the student who I knew was way more advanced than the rest of the class. When looking at these students' papers, I always had the urge to hold them to a higher standard than the others, because I knew they were capable of more. I always had to go back and recheck my grading to make sure that I didn't take off more points from the person who I knew could do it easily, vs the kid who was really struggling in the class. Never intentional, but occasionally I caught myself and had to fix the grade before returning the papers.
I would definitely schedule a conference with the teacher and speak to him/her about why your son's grades have dropped. It is possible that this was vindictive, but most teachers don't do that.

This case does sound suspesious(sic). Grading can and should be adjusted to needs of the child just as curriculum and materials should be differentiated but I doubt this is the case. Unfortunetly there is a human element and peoples pettiness and weakness can come out. "we'll show her" Grades really don't matter it is the advancement of skills learned. This is at least until GPA is an issue that influences money.