FWIW, I don't think that most of the schools we've dealt with have much experience in interpreting test scores or have much experience dealing with kids like my dd14, either, but we have had a few who did a good job recognizing that her needs were rather different than most of the other GT ided kids and who advocated for her as a result.
Yes, this.
My DD13 is one of a very slim handful of PG kids in our virtual school's entire system (nationwide, I mean, so at least 20K kids, pretty much everyone in Baltimore knows her BY NAME alone). Oh, sure, they have a fairly high frequency of HG kids who are +1 or +2 years accelerated (maybe 10% of the enrollment is kids who are more than MG, at a guess)-- the environment is definitely 'enriched' in those kinds of students
because so few schools serve them anything like well...
but kids like mine are still exceedingly rare. There is a vast gulf between what typical students need and what MG ones do, but the difference between MG and HG is just as large.
Our first teacher was
fascinated by my description of DD's internalized mastery-learning. I had no idea that it was weird because she's always been this way; apparently that is something that a lot of educators with GT endorsements haven't ever actually
seen, but have only heard about.
The upshot is that for many subjects/tasks, the learning is seemingly happening overnight and like a light switch-- nothing-nothing-nothing-nothing... BANG. Complete mastery, inside-and-out, often of a fairly wide swathe of material. There is no "practice and revise, rinse-and-repeat" for her. At that point, further instruction really
is a waste of time, and probably damages the relationship between teacher and student because the point
should be on the learning, right? Not on "compliance."
Nothing short of extremely flexible placement and pacing is truly appropriate for a student like that-- and the more inflexible the placement(s), the worse the fit gets.
All of our troubles with the school come down to a lack of flexibility. ALL of them.
I'm a bit jaded at this point, but my basic feeling is that it is
seldom the case that a "gradeskip solves problems." Maybe it makes the match between student readiness and curriculum less apparent, but it doesn't remove problems which actually exist in most cases. Why not? Because a school that is flexible enough to work for an HG+ child is going to do what they can
without a gradeskip (mostly), and one that isn't is ONLY going to do the skip and then blame any future difficulties on the student's immaturity or the parent's unrealistic expectations. Yes, cynical of me, I realize, but that is how I tend to see this working for more people than not.
A gradeskip
alone doesn't solve the underlying problem of inflexible pedagogy and rigid thinking.
