I agree, too, that you should look at what the standard proficiency level is at your school for kids leaving 2nd. Sometimes schools want kids to still be in the top 90% of students in the higher grade, but I agree with your DD that sometimes it can be good for a child to be average.
Thanks to the wonders of the internet (and a fairly consistent state-wide policy), I've determined that required proficiency for kids leaving 2nd is 60%. Which is *whoa* lower than I'd have guessed.
Either the kid who sits through an entire year of school and still only gets 60% of the material is being ill-served by promotion, or a kid who knows 90% of the material without sitting through any of it is *still* going to be bored in the next year up. Or both - I remember my high school principal explaining to me that public schools are meant to serve the kids in the middle, and if you don't fall in the middle, you shouldn't expect to be well served.
Thanks to all the people mentioning HSing, I realized there's an alternative I hadn't considered. I need childcare Jan-April, and can't HS those months - but the public school has to take her back at any point if I re-enroll her, and can't keep me from dis-enrolling her later. (We've got strong state-level HS protections.) Now, there are many downsides to that sort of scheme, and it's not ideal - but if none of my other choices are ideal, there's no reason to rule out a possible option just because it's bizarre.
