Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments How critical is school selection?

Our 7 year old boy (2nd grade, public school) scored almost 100% in the Visual Spatial subset of the WISC-5. No full scale score because he didn’t want to finish the test. He has no learning disabilities or ADHD. He is amazing with math and ok with reading. Ideally the school would challenge him with Math and help him with reading but the class is too big.

I’m highly educated and can easily satisfy his curiosity and exploration with projects we do together at home (STEM, electrical and mechanical engineering, etc.). However, I suspect that his emotional development and well being is at risk as long as he is going to a school that doesn’t cater to gifted children. Even if he got an IEP, the “bones” of the school are the same. My intuition is that being around other gifted kids and teachers who specialize in giftedness can make a difference. But how big of a difference? Can anyone with a gifted child share their experience of NOT sending their child to a gifted school? Do you regret it?

My son maintains that he went to primary school for the games and sports and learnt nothing from the formal lessons provided in his six years there after his kindergarten year. Instead, he read up, and watched videos, on a wide range of maths and science topics at home and spent his time in class contemplating these concepts. His ceiling-bumping achievements across a range of statewide and nationwide assessments, as well as extracurricular maths and science competitions, back up his assertions (although he was reasonably fortunate to have encountered several teachers who recognised how much of an outlier he was and enabled him), so in this digital age, and with gifted and accomplished parents as mentors, the content offered at school may be less important than it was when we were at that stage.

Encouraging them to lead their own learning and providing access to good resources (books, e-books, online programs, educational outings) may, in the long term, be more beneficial than constantly campaigning for IEPs at school, as teachers often don’t tailor IEPs well (such as when my son lamented having to do maths worksheets one year ahead of his third grade cohort when he had already mastered the content three to four years ahead of his grade and just wanted to be left alone to ponder such questions as what a planar graph would look like if all rational coordinates were one colour and all other coordinates were another). Your concerns are understandable, but find ways to proactively support his self-development, rather than constantly worry about the level of delivery by the school.

ETA, after completing secondary studies at our local high school, where many students focus on trade apprenticeships, but teachers accommodated my son to use his laptop to learn at his own pace, he is now in his second year at Uni, studying advanced level subjects for his research and design engineering degree and absolutely thriving in an environment best suited to self directed learners. Recently, he called attention to an error in a question of a major exam, written by a professor who has achieved ministerial prizes, and someone had to be called in by the invigilator, to revise the question to make it viable.

My kids went to public school, not gifted school. More than the academics in elementary is the emotional health. If you have a school that encourages your child to learn, encourages them to be themselves, you're good. If you have a school that places a ceiling on your kid and criticizes their characteristics and any little way they are "less than", your child will be miserable and damaged for life. If your child is at DYS level, a gifted school will not be enough. So it's important that you find a nurturing environment vs an academically rigorous experience.

I believe that school selection is very important for profoundly gifted children.

My hypothesis is that children can thrive in a school where their IQ is within two standard deviations of the mean. If that's the case, they will have some academic peers in the school that they can relate to. If they are 3+ standard deviations away, there is likely nobody near them intellectually, and that can make for loneliness.

My children attended a public school system where the average SAT score is over 1300. Even though they were near the top of the class, they still had a number of very smart friends their entire time in school. They were well liked and my son was even elected as middle school president (no president in high school).

I realized the importance of this school fit when we attended a Davidson weekend retreat many years ago. There many of the families reported that their children had few friends and no intellectual peers, and often underperformed in school. My son who came with me realized how lucky he was.

My son connected with the mainstream students through sports, music and extracurricular interests. He did attend Yr 5 & 6 selective classes with students from a much wider geographical area. Many years later, he described how he had excitedly looked forward to these classmates with whom he had expected to be able to share his intellectual ideas, but was disappointed to find that the selective class students weren’t qualitatively much different from his previous classmates, which influenced his decision to turn down an offer at a selective high school, which in hindsight, was the best decision, giving 2400 extra hours (over six years of high school) to pursue his own interests. He is now at a prestigious university and has connected with the best and brightest from many of the top schools across our country, by mutually engaging in a wide range of academic, sports, music and arts activities.

ETA: My daughters both started school early and were 6-18 months younger than their classmates, so whilst they both eventually ended up academically at the top of their year, I think they always felt comfortable and at the right grade level. Early entry wasn’t an option for my son as he was deemed not socially ready, whereas the girls, my eldest in particular, had/have excellent social skills.

Many thoughtful comments above.

I think that when we are considering learners in a very small percentage of the population, there will not be a single approach that is indisputably the "best" for every one of them. The diversity within this 5-6% (a relatively generous estimate of the GT percentage) can easily be as great as that within the middle 68%, if not greater. I would agree that critical considerations in schooling focus on academic and social-emotional development. But the foci of need and appropriate structures for supporting growth in primary need areas vary from child to child, and from moment to moment for each child.

We have taken a flexible approach to school placement that is open to new approaches during and between school years. None of our children have been in congregated/substantially-separate gifted programming, but they have experienced significant modifications, including homeschooling, in-class differentiation, subject/grade acceleration (including dual enrollment) and early entry, many of which were available because of careful school selection, based less on the nominal structure of the school than on how amenable administrators and teachers were to working with our children's specific needs and strengths.

Our criteria have always been: are our children happy, learning, growing, loving and feeling loved? If yes to all of the preceding, then this setting is working. If not, then we problem-solve and work collaboratively to improve the setting until it becomes clear that it is intractable. Then move on, even if it's the middle of the term.

We also have not placed all of our dependence on school for these important areas of development. No matter how fabulous the school fit is for a child, we are still the parents, with many other venues outside formal education for nurturing their holistic growth. Just as no one person can meet all of the needs of any other person, no one school can meet all of the needs of a child. Use your community of caring adults and children, of diverse abilities and interests. One may find one's "people" in or out of school, and, more importantly, if open to it, one may discover that there are multiple dimensions on which connections and affinities may be discovered.