cover article in Time magazine on gifted education

My wife and I thought this was an interesting article. Here are some
excerpts. Other research supporting academic acceleration of gifted
student is at http://www.nationdeceived.org/ .

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...653653,00.html

Are We Failing Our Geniuses?
by John Cloud
Time Magazine, August 27, 2007

[T]he lack of awareness about the benefits of grade skipping is
emblematic of a larger problem: our education system has little idea
how to cultivate its most promising students. Since well before the
Bush Administration began using the impossibly sunny term "no child
left behind," those who write education policy in the U.S. have
worried most about kids at the bottom, stragglers of impoverished
means or IQs. But surprisingly, gifted students drop out at the same
rates as nongifted kids--about 5% of both populations leave school
early. Later in life, according to the scholarly Handbook of Gifted
Education, up to one-fifth of dropouts test in the gifted range.
Earlier this year, Patrick Gonzales of the U.S. Department of
Education presented a paper showing that the highest-achieving
students in six other countries, including Japan, Hungary and
Singapore, scored significantly higher in math than their bright U.S.
counterparts, who scored about the same as the Estonians. Which all
suggests we may be squandering a national resource: our best young
minds.

....

[S]ince at least the mid-1980s, schools have often forced gifted
students to stay in age-assigned grades--even though a 160-IQ kid
trying to learn at the pace of average, 100-IQ kids is akin to an
average girl trying to learn at the pace of a retarded girl with an IQ
of 40. Advocates for gifted kids consider one of the most pernicious
results to be "cooperative learning" arrangements in which high-
ability students are paired with struggling kids on projects.
Education professor Miraca Gross of the University of New South Wales
in Sydney has called the current system a "lockstep curriculum ... in
what is euphemistically termed the 'inclusion' classroom." The gifted
students, she notes, don't feel included.

....

Actually, research shows that gifted kids given appropriately
challenging environments--even when that means being placed in classes
of much older students--usually turn out fine. At the University of
New South Wales, Gross conducted a longitudinal study of 60
Australians who scored at least 160 on IQ tests beginning in the late
'80s. Today most of the 33 students who were not allowed to skip
grades have jaded views of education, and at least three are dropouts.
"These young people find it very difficult to sustain friendships
because, having been to a large extent socially isolated at school,
they have had much less practice ... in developing and maintaining
social relationships," Gross has written. "A number have had
counseling. Two have been treated for severe depression." By contrast,
the 17 kids who were able to skip at least three grades have mostly
received Ph.D.s, and all have good friends.