I need help deciding whether or not to push things with my school district here in NJ. We are in a small rural community that has an elementary school of 500 students max. It seems that despite the fact the my DD is several SDs away from the norm, she is on the wrong side of that norm; the RHS. Consequently, she appears to have no legal right to an appropriate education in the public school sector - she has no diagnosed conditions.

As some of you will be only too painfully aware, particularly with girls, standing out is not good. It invites all kinds of 'girl bullying' - telling lies and generally making the outlier miserable. This in turn, from my limited forays into the available information online, appears to trigger over excitabilities and sensitivities.

School administrators will then come along and tell you that your child has social developmental issues so insist that the child should not be accelerated. 'A child should be allowed to be a child' they pompously declare and insist that social development is more important than academic development. They then go on to tell you that you can always do more academic work outside of school hours - oblivious to the contradiction. Your child, the one who has to be allowed to be a child, instead of being allowed to go out and play like a normal child after school should instead crack open the books?????? School administrators appear to think that academic outliers on the RHS of the norm must have been forced and borderline abused.

I have been through all of the above and have just had our request for acceleration denied - and conveniently, schools are now out here so no discussion or appeal can be heard until AFTER the new school year has begun. I am quite disheartened but do have time to organize my case. We have done the IOWA acceleration evaluation (3rd edition) and our child appears to be an excellent candidate. We had done this because we believe that the school may resist because they did not want an avalanche from other parents insisting on the same thing. The school was not even aware of the Iowa scale and so we introduced it to a) measure this ourselves to ensure the we were basing our request on solidly objective criteria and b) to give the school an objective yardstick by which to consider future requests. As of now, they have not even looked at the Iowa scale - such is their apparent resistance to acceleration that they will not even consider an objective and researched tool.

This leads me to the real question for you guys - am I guilty of confirmation bias myself?
I have only seen articles that basically tell you that your child will crash and burn (or turn into a dysfunctional husk of what they could have been) if they do not get accelerated. Could someone point me to any accelerations that had negative consequences?

Sorry for the long rant but I am sure that I am on a road that many here have travelled - I would appreciate all advice and any links that you can provide.

Isn't the whole point of the IOWA scale to prevent accelerating kids who aren't good candidates and might have a bad outcome. Of course it can go wrong. Either where the child was not a good candidate OR where the child is not supported or is even actively sabotaged. Doesn't mean it's not absolutely the best choice for the right child...

I'm so relieved we skipped my DD... And worried that we should have held back another DD who is extremely young for grade due to birthdate.... Cuts both ways with outliers...

You would think...

Confirmation bias? Probably. On the other hand, being aware of such bias gives you the tools to be wary of acting upon that bias rather than objective criteria. It seems to me that you've done that.

Placement changes are always about a trade between risks and benefits. That can be moving to a new school, accelerating, or retaining a child.

I don't know what to tell you with respect to your local district. I guess my response would be based on the child in question-- how unhappy is your child? How rapidly did the school year deteriorate, and are you seeing really disturbing red flags behaviorally? If your child is exhibiting signs of serious distress, then that is your call, as a parent, to do whatever seems feasible to mitigate the problems causing that distress.

(By distress, I mean self-destructive, depressive, or destructive behaviors-- school refusal, if emphatic, would be enough.)

ColinsMum (in UK) provides her child with advanced materials to work on in class, *instead* of busywork. Have you considered (discussed with school/attempted) this?

(The accelleration battle with the school might well be unwinnable, or it might result in a very toxic environment (sabotage) for your daughter.)

First, remember that even though it seems like your child has no legal right, it is actually federal law that ALL children to provided with a "free and appropriate education". (I assume that you were being sarcastic by saying she doesn't.) I have found that being able to say to a school that you know there is a federal law that provides this right is often helpful in getting their attention. Another catch phrase right now is "annual yearly progress" which basically means that each child should be able to show a year's worth of growth in an academic year, if your child's scores haven't increased enough from the beginning of this year to the end, then you can also use that as reason for acceleration - to allow her to have the opportunity to have a year's worth of growth in an academic year.
Then, explain to them that as you are working to figure out the best "appropriate education" for your DD, you would like their help via the Iowa scale.
In terms of gifted girls - we have 2 of them and the wrong academic and therefore social setting absolutely turns on the excitabilities - to maximum! We too have been told that our girls need to be allowed to be kids and everything else. In the end we confronted the administration with the contradiction in their view that we could just do more at home afterwards by explaining exactly which of her "kid activities" she'd have to give up to be after schooled. We also saw DD starting to shut down in the face of a bad academic placement, right when all of the literature said we would - at 3rd grade. It was when she told us that she was tired of pretending that she didn't use big words normally and when she was tired of having to explain everything so she just stopped talking at school that both DH and I sort of freaked out. (Being high school teachers we both have seen numerous girls with no self-confidence due to bullying in elementary and we were not going to let our daughter become another one.)
I would use the summertime getting proof together about why acceleration is good - use some of the resources either on the Davidson resource site or on Hoagies. Slowly email them to the administration throughout the summer (I guarantee they read their email over the summer.)
I know you said you were looking for examples of acceleration gone bad, but I don't have any - sorry, our acceleration was a great move for DD.

Unfortunately "Free Appropriate Public Education" is not a universal right.
http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/edlite-FAPE504.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Appropriate_Public_Education
But obviously it should be, and it's still worth insisting on it.

Kerry - thank you for pointing to 'free and appropriate education' federal law and 'annual yearly progress' requirement.

Unfortunately, it looks like it would be difficult to use the latter argument ('annual yearly progress'), as a gifted child would normally have large progress even if taught nothing in school - because of the exposure outside the school. (I am playing the devil's advocate here. I do not know how to help the argument.)

Example: suppose, the child is in 1st grade in school, and his level moves from 3th to 4th grade (according to an out-of-level test, like NWEA MAP) between the start and the end of the school year. Of course, the child was not taught that in the school, but the school would just argue that the child got his 'annual yearly progress' anyway, and they have to do nothing.

"Free and appropriate public education" (FAPE) is a term of art from disability law. Unless your child has an IEP or a 504, they don't have a right to FAPE.

Do you happen to know if "gifted IEPs" (which some states seem to have) are included in this?

Let's ask the state of New Jersey what they say:

In N.J.A.C. 6A: 8, Standards and Assessment for Student Achievement...


That's something perhaps.

IMO, this looks very good - the key word is 'appropriate'. (And the whole phrase is actually bolded in the original - the author(s) must have known of plenty of parents banging their heads against the wall.)

(In our state the statement for gifted education is applicable only in SOME cases, AND it is so weak that really anything (no matter how irrelevant/useless) would satisfy it.)

But who gets to decide what the term 'appropriate' means?

In other words, who has the final say in which adaptions and services are appropriate?

I don't know who makes the final decision, but you could use the Iowa scale as an indication of what would be appropriate.
At our school gifted EPs are talked about the same as IEPs in terms of the law, so we were able to really push on what "the data" was telling us.

Also, I don't remember who was playing devil's advocate about the yearly progress, but you would be surprised how many gifted kids don't actually make AYP because they have given up on academics and according to the test scores they have not increased their scores enough to be classified as having made a year's worth of progress. I would agree thought that a gifted kid's year's worth of progress is not the same as other students. We actually used that very argument in our meeting with the school last fall to get DD placed into algebra 1. They were saying her test scores from the previous year didn't qualify her to take the placement test into the class (it is considered an honors class in our middle school and counts for high school credit), let alone show she had made enough progress in math. Our response was that it was partially due to her lack of interest in the level of math being taught and her understanding that the test scores didn't really show whether or not she had learned everything taught during the year.
We successfully argues that she was ready for algebra based on what we know to be her rate of learning and that if she were not placed in a more challenging math class she would again not make the gains she is capable of in a year because of inappropriate placement rather than inability.
Good luck!

Thanks Kerry.

I tried to introduce the Iowa scale as a proven and objective tool for selecting the most appropriate instructional adjustments but have encountered major bias so far. It is not over yet...

My primary motivation is that I do not want my DD get so bored that she shuts down and then starts to underachieve making any kind of special placement after that impossible.

I'm not a big advocate of the IOWA scale. The IOWA scale tests knowledge; in many cases it has material that your child would only know through experiential learning, not intuitively. It is not capability-based testing. I really don't find it useful for the purpose it was intended. In our case, the IOWA scale was administered, but not by a qualified person, and this person was dead set against accelerating my son. We were able to convince another school to accelerate him one year, and it made a world of difference. He was much happier. There were a few speed bumps in that his handwriting was a atrocious, and he had to deal with a few areas where he missed some of the steps in math/English, but he caught up very, very quickly on those things. Just because a child is gifted doesn't mean he can gloss over certain topics and never have to learn them at all. For example, my son was able to do advanced math but was horrible at basic math concepts...sounds strange, but true. I think he did much better socially as well. He's now 15 and very well-adjusted. Much more mature emotionally and socially than his peers, but one grade skip was better than nothing at all...

I think you are mixing up the ITBS (Iowa test of Basic Skills given for various grade levels) with the Iowa Scale used in Gifted education meetings as a means of gathering all sorts of various data into a form (scale) to determine if someone is a good candidate for a skip or subject acceleration. It has all sorts of data points from achievement testing to questions such as does the child want to skip or is there a sibling in the next grade up. They are different things totally.

Some kids who skip have bad outcomes as do some kids who don't skip. It does not necessarily follow that the bad outcome was caused by the skip.

There is very little good research on accelerated children vs unaccelerated. Most of what gets presented as research is anecdote or hopelessly outdated. Whether skipping helped children in 1990 has little utility today when college courses are available free online and there are so many resources outside of school or to be used within a school setting.

I could tell you about many accelerations that have had negative consequences, but these would also be anecdotal and not that helpful. Whether acceleration could be negative for your child depends on your options and your child. Skipping one year seems pretty easy for most kids, but multi-year skips can lead to mismatches that can be challenging. These are easily negotiated by some kids and massive stumbling blocks for others. The social fit can be harder with more age mismatch. Kids who do well and finish college early sometimes struggle to find a path. For kids with clear plans for grad school in STEM, early can be great and save time on an arduous journey. For kids trying to go to med school or psych grad school, acceptances for 18 yo are quite rare. It can be challenging for kids who are 18 or 19 and out of college to find jobs. It can be even harder for them to figure out what they want to do. I know one very young graduate who ended up working for a few years while trying to get admitted into med school. I'd rather my kids spend that time at home with me paying the bills than working themselves.

I can assure you that we've chosen to pursue higher level learning without changing the actual grade level and have seen no crash and burn or "dysfunctional husk" (like that phrase!). Things that I like about acceleration -- getting closer to the right level, better social maturity of peers, faster access to wider circles (high school changing classes makes taking APs in 9th easier than a 2nd grader getting access to appropriate work), and fewer years of big misfit. Things I don't like -- my kids are in no hurry and higher level work takes more time so they have less free time which they use to grow and learn and explore, skipping one or two or three grades would not be helpful or fix the educational mismatch, uncertainty about whether a 15 yo would be ready to leave home for college, and a massive hassle every year trying to make things work in the age grade. Competitions that depend on grade level may be fun and children are more competitive without skips.

I agree that it's hard to blame poor outcomes on skips or vice versa. There are just too many variables and skipping is just one factor that affects outcome.

Exactly-- the ONLY information is by its very nature going to be a collection of anecdotes.

Slightly off topic...is acceleration better in the younger years? I imagine it being a bigger leap from grade 5 to 7, rather than grade 1 to 3. Or does it make little difference?

That's a bit of a red herring, though. I suspect most of us with accelerated kids would not have picked acceleration as the least worst choice if there were meaningful opportunities for higher level learning at school while retaining the same grade designation.

For instance, if we were in a school district to the west of town, rather than to the east of town, my angst would be over whether DD should elect to take Algebra I or pre-Algebra as a sixth grader, neither of which would technically constitute a subject acceleration in that district, not whether she should attempt a subject acceleration in order to be eligible for placement into pre-Algebra, which is only offered as a seventh grade course in our district. If she were in a specific one of the private schools, she'd technically be enrolled as a fifth grader (and would likely have the leeway to be enrolled as a fourth grader, due to summer birthday) while taking the same classes she's in now.

Some kids bloom where they're planted, and will be fine, accelerated or otherwise accommodated or not. Some kids are less tolerant of mismatch. Some kids will crash and burn even in the absence of apparent academic mismatch. My own personal guess, supported only by anecdote, is that temperament is as large a factor as level of giftedness.

I have been asking for extension work for my son since he started- I even asked if he could bring in his own maths book. He was not allowed. I feel grade skipping is the only option in a school where teaching two different year levels in one class is impossibly hard.

I fear skipping will remain the solution of choice for schools because it creates the least burden on the school economically.

If I had one wish for schools, it would be that subjects be scheduled across levels at the same time. Public schools have the economies of scale to make this happen successfully from the earliest years. It boggles my mind that age is still the criterion against which "ability" is sorted. I believe our current system does a disservice to all children by not addressing individual ability across subjects adequately, whether NT or GT.

I agree, aquinas. When I was younger, my family moved to a different state. At my new school, they gave me an assessment and put me in the appropriate grade (a year above than my previous school). When I went back to my old state, they put me back down to my age-appropriate grade! Ruined me for school.

Middle school, it's hard socially (just as moving is).


High school is hard BOTH socially and also in that you need all of those years for college prep/planning-- the timeline runs from late 9th through to spring of 12th in terms of the things that need to happen if you're planning to apply to any elite colleges.

So no, it's not that socially or academically it's necessarily better at the elementary level, but that there are good pragmatic reasons why it's hard in high school.


DD skipped K through 2, effectively, by being homeschooled for kindy.

She then accelerated by compacting 4th-5th in a single year, though we didn't finish formalizing this arrangement until she was in 9th grade, at which point she moved from 9th to 11th (skipped 10th) at the conclusion of that academic year. If you plan to skip a child older than elementary, you need at least 6-8 months to make sure that all of your i's are dotted and t's are crossed for extracurriculars, for sports, etc. etc.

Early acceleration is easy because the material is so easy at that level, and much of it will be repeated later.

Yeah-- I'd think a skip-skip is easiest in K-3. On the other hand, given what a last-resort it is, and given that administrators are often viewing a skip that way as well, in some respects, the best way to approach a skip is to compact rather than to 'skip.'

That is, have a child do 2y in a single school year by being placed in a split classroom in the younger grade, and at the end of that year, move with the older cohort.

Minimizes academic gaps, minimizes social displacement, and is much more 'natural' feeling to both child and peers.

Content-wise, K-4 all seems mostly osmotic stuff, but later there is much more room for real knowledge gaps. I'm glad DS is skipping 2nd largely because full gifted starts in 3rd. Speeding up entry towards middle school is also cool, because you are more likely to encounter teachers who are subject matter specialists there.

Our DD skipped K (well the extra year of K she was supposed to do, due to her birthdate and our state's weird system she was supposed to do 18 months of K and did only 6). The issue I struggle with 18 months later is feeling that a second skip is already needed, though not yet DESPERATELY needed, and I do tend to believe she'd be better off skipping earlier rather than later. BUT I really don't want to do that second skip if it can possibly be avoided. Currently we are about to start partial homeschool to "avoid" it, which of course is likely to guarantee the necessity later... We will be pushing hard for her to be in split classes for 3/4, 4/5 over the next two years, so that she can skip via compaction if we really think another can't be avoided. In my fantasy land being continually placed in the lower grade of a composite might tide her over until we can move her to a more academic environment when she is a little older. And will also provide access to a wider age group of peers.

Can I ask you a question? What is partial homeschool?

In some states, the public schools will allow you to enroll subject-by-subject, or just for music / art / PE, for instance. Highly dependent on state and district what you can do and how much flexibility you have.