Is acceleration really the best we can do?

Grade acceleration is one of those things that never happen quietly. It’s one of the most contentious issues in education, in the sense that although it’s not common enough to provoke ongoing controversy, it always comes to a fight when the topic arises.

The majority of both classroom teachers and parents are likely to agree that grade-skipping is tantamount to dropping a neutron bomb on a child’s social life; many teachers will actually further argue that placing a child in class with older students will have negative effects on his academic success as well. Gifted educators, on the other hand, will tell you that acceleration has been proven to be of more benefit to gifted children than just about any other course of action, and that it is an utterly baseless myth that grade-skipping has any negative social effects. The latter argument is backed by just about every study that has ever been done on the subject.

The social argument against acceleration is founded on the false precept that children naturally “fit in” and interact best with others their own age. This is not even necessarily true of average-achieving students; it is not unusual to find children who are more comfortable with people a few years older or younger than themselves than they are with those their own age. With gifted children, it is actually very unlikely to be true. How probable is it, really, that a three-year-old with a second-grade reading level will prefer the company of other three-year-olds? How likely is it that other three-year-olds will find her an attractive playmate? It is far more likely that she will befriend older children, with whom she can share more of her interests and hold a more fulfilling conversation.

As for the academic effects of acceleration, it is nothing short of laughable to presume that giving a child work at his level will be somehow damaging.

These two rebuttals are generally the bulk of the gifted educator’s argument, which, once made, will usually be forwarded to six people who won’t read it and one who will file it and then lose the key to the cabinet. If by some miracle the argument is listened to by the classroom teachers, principal, parents, and school district administrators, the child will be moved down the hall, possibly given a phone book to sit on, and then treated like any other member of their new class. The problem with this should be obvious.

A gifted child, even one who is younger than the others in his class, is not like any other member of the class. Not for one second can we assume that a year’s age difference negates the needs of a gifted child or the responsibility we have to him. I go back to my favorite myth of gifted education: that gifted children are born “ahead” of their agemates but progress at the same speed. The opposite being the truth, it should take only a moment’s thought to realize that, regardless of her age, a gifted child who is at a fifth-grade level in September will reach sixth-grade level long before June. Consider a vastly oversimplified hypothetical child - let’s call her “Sophie” - who acquires knowledge and skills at exactly 1.5 times the average rate. At age four, she works at a first-grade level, so her school agrees to advance her to first grade from Kindergarten. At first, she’s overjoyed at the challenge, but that soon wears off when she realizes that whenever the teacher explains something new, she has it figured out long before the other children. That’s bad enough, but the worst is yet to come: at the end of the year, the rest of the class has advanced to the level at which they should be at the beginning of second grade, but Sophie, who is now five years old, is functioning at the level of a child halfway through second grade (age 7.5). Fast-forward three years, and Sophie is eight years old, going to school with nine-year-olds, and working at the level of a twelve-year-old.

This example isn’t true to life, of course (the phrase “spherical chickens in a vacuum” comes to mind); children develop in fits and starts rather than on a straight line, for one. But I hope it serves to illustrate my primary disagreement with acceleration, which is that placing a gifted child in a higher grade does not provide for the speed or the depth with which he can process information; rather, it simply moves him into a group which is working at his academic level at that precise moment in time, but which he may soon be beyond. Additionally, it can serve as an excuse to ignore the needs of such children, giving schools and teachers the opportunity to say something to the effect of “Jack has already been accelerated, which we feel is adequate provision for him.”

Furthermore, older children are in no way a gifted child’s peers simply by dint of having an extra year or two of knowledge and experience under their belts. A gifted child’s only peers are other gifted children. Parents who are worried about their children “fitting in” would do well to understand that it is difficult for a child to have a healthy social life when they are faced with a complete dearth of intellectual equals.

Acceleration has many things going for it, chief among them that it is, once you have the necessary signatures and forms, remarkably easy. A child who’s been grade-skipped can get on the same bus in the morning, go to the same school, play with the same friends, and come home at the same time as they did before the skip, without the parents being inconvenienced and without any financial implications on any party. It’s the educational equivalent of a “fire-and-forget” missile, or the “easy button” in those Staples advertisements - one action, relatively easy to make, that is generally thought to have drastic effect. And it does. But I for one believe it is simply not enough - and beyond that, I find the concept of it offensive. If teachers claimed that the very best we could offer students with special needs was to hold them back a year every now and then, there would be outrage from just about every direction. Acceleration is exactly the same concept. Just like children with special needs, gifted children require a unique kind of education and a high level of individual attention. They require resources created with their talents in mind and educators trained to help them reach their potential. They require a little more attention and consideration than it takes to move them three classrooms down the corridor.

Many gifted educators swear by grade acceleration. I consider it an admission of defeat. To advocate a grade-skip, in my mind, implies that the system has so failed a gifted child that the only option is to move them up into a class where they might at least encounter a few concepts they haven’t already mastered. I won’t for a moment suggest that it doesn’t help; I just think we could do much, much better.