Gradeskips - yes they are accepted as a best practice around here, due to the Davidson's book, Genius Denied.
But, while full skips have some attractive features, no one answer is best for everyone.
I particularly like the idea of subject accelerations with or without full skips for the part of the gifted range that falls around 3 standard deviations from the mean. But that takes a school system that is functioning well enough to keep things going. My brothers were sub. acc. in Math, for years, then when they got to 6th grade, the oldest class in the building, they did 6th grade math again. My husband got summer birthday plus sub. acc. with a nice bunch of friends in Math and Language Arts, and seems much for comfortable inside his skin than I was with only an early enterance.
Sometimes it is really hard to sort out the effects of skips, versus just being different, versus the attitudes that come in from the outside. Sometimes folks post here and aren't sure if their kid is 'really gifted' - to me, if they need to post here instead of calmly venting to their friends, it's a sign that they have gifted kids, or at least kids at a higher level of giftedness (LOG) than the people they see around them.
BTW - I want to go on record about how stinky it is that US culture is so biased against short males. I've been reading 'Ender's Shadow' recently, and I always thing about the main character being smarter than everyone else AND shorter than everyone else - what a pain!
Smiles,
Grinity
