Hi all,
I don't have the heart to write a detailed response. But I'll offer a report from a purportedly top-notch public elementary school in Northern California. We have NO gifted education. Naively, I joined my school's "site council" thinking I could work on it from within. The Site Council is a team composed of principal, parents and teachers. It develops the key objectives for the school, which must be written in stone, with measurable objectives. We had several academic objectives. For each, I could summarize them as "demonstrate that we have X percent fewer students performing below grade average."
Several of the parents asked, "couldn't we add an objective that each student make one year of academic progress during the school year"? This gives the school incentive to support accelerated kids to some extent at least.
The short answer: no. That's not our mission.
Pretty black and white. Pretty bleak.
OP - You are not alone,
Sue
