I think that is the failing, ultimately, of radical acceleration.
It does a lousy job of truly meeting
gifted needs (since it doesn't account for asynchrony and pacing differences), and the greater the asynchrony, the more badly it seems to meet those needs.
Like ultramarina, though, as long as AP/Gifted is intended for 90th+ and not for 99th+ students, acceleration is the best we can do.
It just makes me mad that this is mostly true because
actual differentiation isn't available for the kids that are most in need of it-- because honestly, I can see the logic behind the angst directed at gifted programs that cater to the not-quite-gifted...
because those kids are "ideally" intelligent, and realistically, most of them don't have unmet needs the way kids at the tails of the distribution do.
Our local district's answer to this is to suggest that "ALL of our coursework is directed at the gifted population" and note how many AP courses they offer. Well, of course. When you've identified 30% of the students as GT, then it makes sense to make it part of the regular curriculum. The problem is that if you don't set the bar any higher than 90th percentile (and, as noted by cricket, there are very definitely ways around even THAT cutoff if you happen to be an insider), the kids who are another couple of standard deviations out from the mean
still don't have their needs met, and administrators can pat themselves on the back all they like... but it doesn't change the fact that much of what is happening under the guise of "gifted" instruction.... isn't. Because that would be mean, wouldn't it? To offer instruction to kids at the 80th-95th percentiles as though they were as able as the kid in that room who is 99.9th.
I realize that I'm on my soapbox about this... but I truly just wish that "gifted" programs would quit calling themselves that and start calling it something more stigmatizing/less desirable somehow. The kids that actually
need the differentiation might actually get some that way.
This kind of arms race of helicopter parenting has pretty deleterious effects on HG+ students, after all. It leads to policies that reward parents with the greatest persistence and resources, not students with greatest ability.
