Saving the Smart Kids

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Released this week at nationdeceived.org, the report is a distillation of hundreds of past studies on grade skipping and other forms of acceleration (everything from taking a year of math in a semester to early college entrance). Those who follow education debates know that most school-reform ideas — charter schools, phonics and high-stakes testing leap to mind — are promoted on the strength of highly contested evidence. By contrast, as far back as 1965, Milton Gold said in his book Education of the Intellectually Gifted, "No paradox is more striking than the inconsistency between research findings on acceleration and the failure of society to reduce the time spent by superior students in formal education." Forty years later, the authors of A Nation Deceived — Nicholas Colangelo and Susan Assouline, who teach at the University of Iowa, and Miraca Gross of the University of New South Wales in Australia — must tell us, once again, that "we are not aware of any other educational practice that is so well researched yet so rarely implemented."

The Nation Deceived authors, longtime academic investigators not known as partisans in the education wars, have amassed persuasive evidence showing that, for decades, accelerated students have performed almost as well on standardized tests as older classmates, even those with similar IQs — meaning that an accelerated 7-year-old with an IQ of 133 typically scores nearly as well as on the same test as a 133-IQ 8-year-old who has had an extra year of school. Accelerants far outscore their equally gifted age-mates who did not move ahead. Radical accelerants also do well, even after jumping years of classes: a 20-year longitudinal study of Australians who had skipped at least three grades found they were more likely to earn advanced degrees than equally gifted students who didn't skip.

But our greatest fears about acceleration are not pedagogical but psychological. The leapfroggers may ace exams, but isn't it depressing to leave friends and become the runt in a class of older strangers? How does a 12year-old react when her 15year-old classmates start making out after school and getting their driver's permits?

In interviews with educators in eight states this month, TIME reporters heard such worries repeatedly. Debbie Pea, supervisor of gifted education for the Garden Grove Unified School District, south of Los Angeles, says her school system discourages grade skipping and instead approaches the challenge of exceptional children with this question: "How is it [that] we can meet the needs of gifted kids in a regular classroom without saying, 'Gee, you're 5, but you can read at a seventh-grade level, [so] let's put you up to at least sixth grade'? It doesn't make sense at a social or emotional level," says Pea.

Even the most enthusiastic proponents of grade skipping would have qualms about placing a 5year-old in an ordinary sixth-grade class of rowdy tweens. But most kids who are accelerated — even radically — turn out fine. Accelerated students are nearly as likely to participate in extracurriculars as nonaccelerants and rate no differently on personal-adjustment scales. Some early entrants to college find freshman year difficult, but by the end of that year, they score virtually the same as older classmates do on psychological inventories. Some researchers have found a little-fish-big-pond effect on the self-esteem of kids who are moved into classes with intellectual equals for the first time. But the effect is usually small and temporary (and, some speculate, healthy for the often outsize egos of highly talented students).