Grade Skipping or Acceleration – a Good Option for Your Child?
What you don’t know can limit your child’s potential
The truth is that acceleration works and we’ve known this for a long time. But the lack of information and misinformation floating about makes for strong resistance. – a Nation Deceived
- Does your child always get great grades?
- Does school work seem really easy for your child?
- Is your child bored to death in school?
- Is your child really smart but doing poorly in school because they are not engaged?
Introduction
Budget cuts have negatively impacted many gifted programs – in fact, many schools now offer nothing for gifted children at all.
So as a parent, what can you do?
When my daughter was three she was reading and doing math. She begged to go to preschool. So, away we went. And that’s where I learned the hard way what it was really like for her to be in a class of age-peers rather than other children who were learning at the same level, or like-minded peers. She quickly became miserable and cried a lot. The school had assured us they could accommodate her levels of learning but reality turned out to be different. After some months of this misery my daughter began to lose her interest in learning – something that had been a driving force for her up until then. The sparkle went out of her eye. We finally pulled her from preschool and it took a full 6 months before she regained her enthusiasm for learning. I vowed I would never again put her in a situation that did not support her level of learning. Easier said than done, of course.
In the United States, many people are afraid when it comes to the idea of rapid acceleration or children skipping grades. Parents worry that if their gifted child skips one or more grades they’ll stick out even more than they already do or that their child will develop social issues and not have friends.
As we all know, children are ready for different things at different ages. And just because our system dictates that a child start school by a certain age does not mean that the child is ready at that age—or that they were not ready to start several years earlier. Our arbitrary division of education by age has nothing to do with ability or maturity levels of the children being taught. Yet somewhere along the line we came to believe that deviating from this system was not in the best interests of the child.
Combine this with current economic challenges and policy issues in education, and it’s clear that educating our gifted children in schools today have become more of a challenge than ever. As it stands now, there are many highly gifted learners who have to wait until as late as fourth grade to receive any formal form of enrichment or accelerated learning. And even then it’s often too little to make a real difference. Furthermore, after being bored for several years, some children have already lost interest in their own education and many of these never regain their interest in learning again.
Types of Acceleration
One viable option for providing an appropriate education for gifted children is rapid acceleration. The many forms of acceleration as mentioned in Types of Acceleration include:
- early admission to kindergarten or first grade
- grade skipping either at beginning or during the year
- self-paced curriculum
- subject acceleration: the child is placed with older peers in one or more content areas
- combined classes: more than one grade level in one classroom
- curriculum compacting: reducing introductory or already mastered materials
- telescoping curriculum: completing material is less than usual time
- pairing student with a mentor for advanced instruction
- extracurricular programs
- correspondence courses: coursework delivered outside of school, such as via Internet
- early graduation from high school or college
- concurrent/dual enrollment: for instance, taking algebra at the middle school level and receiving credit at both the middle school and the high school level
- Advanced Placement, or AP: coursework in high school that will confer college credit upon completion of a standardized examination
- credit by examination: student is awarded advanced standing credit by successfully completing some form of mastery test or activity
- acceleration in college: student is awarded an advanced level of instruction at least one year ahead of normal, achieved with dual enrollment and/or credit by examination or by determination of college teachers and administrators
- early entrance into middle school, high school, or college
Why You Might Consider Rapid Acceleration
If you have a child who might benefit from rapid acceleration but you are afraid, consider this: a 2004 study by the Belin-Blank Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development at the University of Iowa found that a large majority of students who had been accelerated endorsed the move when surveyed years later, saying they been academically challenged and socially accepted. The National Association for Gifted Children, in their position paper on acceleration note that “the purposes of acceleration as a practice with the gifted are to:
- adjust the pace of instruction to the students’ capability in order to develop a sound work ethic
- provide an appropriate level of challenge in order to avoid the boredom from repetitious learning
- reduce the time period necessary for students to complete traditional schooling.
