What is the Best School Strategy for Bright Kids?

For more than 30 years more and more school resources have been reallocated from high-ability/achieving kids to the lowest achievers. Especially in states like California, most school districts have eviscerated gifted programs and pushed teachers to prioritize "the most vulnerable among us." This, of course, is exacerbated by the Democrat-initiated, Republican-embraced No Child Left Behind, which has fundamentally shifted how schools treat and help low-achieving kids but has actually taken resources away from above-average to do it.

A final nail in gifted kids' education coffin is that the average IQ of teachers, especially in the elementary school, has declined. I won’t delve into the fact that many of the best teachers in previous generations were the best and brightest women in the job field (who were unlikely to attain great positions in other fields at the time) and that today women have moved into high positions in nearly all industries (example, they represent half of medical school and law school students). I’ll just say that it is possible that the newer teachers are, perhaps, less capable of teaching gifted kids. And they're less motivated too. Many new teachers are likely to think that the gifted kids will do fine on their own. And they focus on the low achievers.

So, a lucid approach to helping bright kids to live up to their potential accepts that many teachers will do little to help them. That explains why the research finds that the most powerful strategy for helping gifted kids to live up to their potential is grade skipping: for gifted kids to skip between one and six grades, depending on the student. That requires far less teacher ability or effort than, for example, providing more cognitively complex instruction for the gifted student(s) in their increasingly heterogeneous classes.

Now, parents' main concern about grade skipping is social maturity. Even if your high-ability child isn't socially adept, in many cases, it's wiser to have him or her skip a grade(s) than to endure the ongoing boredom and lack of learning that comes from being in a too low-achieving class. Also, grade skipping reduces the chances of a gifted child being ridiculed by classmates as a snob or showoff.

You can mitigate the social risk of grade-skipping by:
• Trying to get another gifted child accelerated into your child's new class.
• Having your child sit next to a kind, socially adept student(s) who can teach your child the higher grade's social and academic norms.
• Ensuring that the receiving teacher will welcome your child and be willing to keep an eye on your child to ensure s/he's being welcomed into the class and to give your child needed feedback, social and academic.

To maximize your chances of getting permission to have your child skip a grade, present to the principal a portfolio including:
• Samples of your child's in- and out-of-school work that suggest the ability to handle the work in a higher grade.
• Samples of work assigned in his current class that demonstrate how beneath his ability or achievement level that work is.
• Standardized test score results.
• Research supporting grade skipping, including those studies that address the social maturity and knowledge-gap issues. An easy way to assemble the research is to print pages from the book Genius Denied. Because principals tend to be very busy, highlight the key sentences.
• If your child writes well, include a letter from your child explaining why it's important s/he be allowed to skip a grade(s).
• Have your child verbally join you in making the case for skipping a grade(s).

Remember that this strategy is best for students in elementary and middle school. Most high schools still have the Advanced, Honors, and Advanced Placement courses to help gifted students thrive and learn. For more on accelerating gifted kids, see the Hoagie's Gifted website on acceleration: http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/acceleration.htm and/or the book, Acceleration Strategies.