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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).