I do wonder what the gifted programs look like in NYC, then. Are they programs that truly serve the needs of HG kids or are they like our GT programs that work maybe a year ahead and work quite well for bright kids but not really gifted kids?
I wonder b/c, although we have nothing like NYC's prepping industry locally, we do have a lot of parental prepping, teacher prepping for kids who they think are GT, and alternative means of getting into GT even if you don't have the ability scores (which aren't that high in and of themselves). Even that amount of prep/alternative admission winds up filling out GT classes with mostly high achievers and very few actually gifted kids. As a result, the programming itself is generally not appropriate for gifted kids.
Much of our GT programming is geared at more of the same faster rather than greater depth or abstraction (although I must give credit to the few teachers who do try for the later over the former). Even when the curriculum is designed with the gifted child in mind, not the prepped high achiever, though, the depth of the conversations in the classroom are limited by the student body, which again, is generally not made up of gifted kids.
I recall one of dd14's middle school teachers bemoaning to me how they were giving out As to kids who turned in the work on time and had the formulary responses but not the kids who were doing innovative or high quality work. It reminded me of this blog on the "formula" for getting high SAT writing scores on the essay:
http://www.applerouth.com/blog/2009/06/01/in-praise-of-folly-writing-the-sat-essay/ Kids who follow the formula score highly, but are we really teaching the gifted kids or grading in the GT classes in such a way as to distinguish who is doing gifted work? Locally for me, no.
