Run. Run FAAAAAAR away from this program (and K12, too, which is all too similar).
Seriously.
The assessment piece of things is fatally flawed, and national C&I doesn't even
understand the problem, much less have any intention of remediating it.
Cloze and Student-Choice formal assessment at a rate of >75% of the of the course assessments is flatly NOT appropriate for anyone at a secondary level, nevermind divergent thinking GT students, and when those assessments don't even follow best practices for average learners, they are *nightmarish* for gifties.
Our
LOCAL administrators, counselors, and teachers have been fantastic to work with (with a couple of notable exceptions). They have been willing to do highly customized, unique scheduling and basically listen beautifully to what we have to say to them. Unfortunately, they can't do a darned thing about what Baltimore hands down to them in the way of system changes and edicts from on-high, often with no communication or reason for changes. Example: Assessments MUST be taken one at a time (really?? three multiple choice questions and I can't staple four of these suckers together to cover half a chapter of social studies at once??) and in order. (I've fought that one and won, but I shouldn't have needed to, YK?)
Similarly, there is now a push to eliminate textbooks and all off-line materials. This *is* happening. There are also initiatives in rollout that are going to eventually prohibit students or parents from printing either text excerpts (from online, or iTexts) or any assessments at all. Sorry, but that isn't working for us, and I have very sound reasons, given the mind-numbing things that I've seen in the assessments from corporate over the years.
C&I simply doesn't care, and the problems have become worse and worse with each passing year. They give lip service to 'academic integrity' and all, but there is also a widespread culture of encouraging teachers to let "struggling" students RE-TAKE assessments for additional credit. This entire concept blows my mind. First, is this a performance assessment? Or is it a formative one? If the latter, then why is it contributing in an absolute (quantitative) manner to a student's grades in the first place?? Is it intended to be norm-referenced? Or criterion referenced?? NO? (And trust, me, the answer is VERY clearly no. HA.)
Well then what the heck
is any particular multiple choice, four question "quiz" supposed to do?
They do NOT understand that "MOS" isn't a differentiation technique. Truly-- their idea of GT math involves giving students
more numerous homework problems nightly, and asks them to sit through basic instruction with struggling classmates (or offers them none at all since they "don't need extra help"-- yeah, don't need extra help to pass NCLB tests). (AUghh)
GT offerings are dressed up versions of regular courses, including all-online curricular materials, infrequent instructional support from teachers whose instructional ratios may exceed 200:1, and most teachers have NO clue how to differentiate for even moderately gifted children.
We've been enrolled with them for 6 years, and this is likely to be our last. NO way could I recommend them for anything beyond 8th grade, and even then, only with some caveats.
There is one (and only one) genuine offering in terms of differentiated instruction-- the Great Books literature elective for GT 3-8. In the hands of a capable and enthusiastic teacher, this course is fantastic and very definitely follows all the best practices for both the medium (distance, e-learning) and for gifted ed (open-ended, discussion with peers, higher order learning vis a vis Bloom's Taxonomy, etc.).
Unfortunately, all that seems to do is to make the deficits in the other instructional content that much more glaring by comparison.
My daughter's 9th grade English texts were about 40% rehashings of JGB short-story selections, but at lower levels of Bloom's taxonomy.
Yes, "honors" level English.
You'd think that someone would have noticed that before several thousand English students experienced such a profound let-down as eager and highly capable high schoolers, wouldn't you?
That's typical of C&I with Connections. 
There are excellent on-line providers. They are university-affiliated, and most are NOT-FOR-PROFIT. That's not intended to be a political statement, by the way. I don't necessarily have any skin in the game in terms of liking/disliking privatization. But I've seen firsthand what happens when a corporation runs a school. It's NOT pretty, and it most definitely is not about what students need, even on average, nevermind special educational niche groups like PG children. This program, with its right/wrong/all-or-nothing assessments (mostly Trivial Pursuit taken directly from reading) FUELS perfectionism. BIG-TIME.
Oh-- Math program is entirely Pearson. ENvision (for K~4?) has plenty of critics, let me just say.
The flexibility of the program basically means radical acceleration. Compacting is only viable from K-6, and it is NOT encouraged. My DD came in as a 3rd grader and was accelerated one more grade after that. Average learners (and moderately gifted kids, for that matter) find this program VERY challenging... PG kids find it (mostly) annoying, barring the occasional good teacher who makes it come alive. (To be fair, my daughter has had about four of those in her slate of ~15 teachers.)
Feel free to PM if you want to get specifics about anything you're curious about-- I've been around the system both as a parent and I've got some insider insights beyond that.
CA has used me and my family for six years as their poster children and lapdogs. Well, doggy's collar is a wee bit too tight this year and I. am. CRANKY.
