I have to agree that it varies so much by child as far as their educational needs go.
For example - ds9 tests at the 98.6% and totally shut down in the regular classroom. Even with a few pull outs he was crazy bored. Now in a GT classroom (most kids average IQ around 130) he still excels and probably could go a bit deeper in most areas.
On the other hand, dd7 was grade skipped and in full time GT classroom. She has DYS scores but haven't applied yet. She still could care less about most academics and behind most of her classmates. She probably could have done just fine in a regular classroom at least at this point in her school career. I don't think she would have minded the easy work.
We have friends with a very PG son and he's in a regular classroom at a low achieving school. Subject accelerated but he wants to stay with age mates and deals with the regular work just fine.
So it just depeneds.
By the way, our local elem. does the ability grouping so that the math oriented teachers teach the highly able students and they switch classes several times a day even as early as 3rd grade. It does seem pretty easy to do.
