Here's how gifted education is supposed to work according to the statute:
1. Student is identified as being gifted, i.e., an IQ of two standard deviations above the mean (with some leeway which allows schools to fudge the results a bit for students just missing the cutoff).
2. The gifted student's present level of educational performance is then determined to see where the student is academically. For example, a third grade student might be reading on a fifth grade level and doing math on a fourth grade level.
3. Then the student's instruction is supposed to be specially designed, i.e., individualized, to meet the needs of the student.
4. Annual goals (what the student is supposed to learn this year) and short term learning objectives (the steps the students is to take to learn the goals) are then developed.
5. And the whole plan is memorialized in a written document (GIEP) which must be approved by the student's parents.
That's how things are supposed to work in theory. In actuality, things typically work a little differently. Here's how it works in practice in most school districts:
1. Student is identified as being gifted.
2. School district recommends that the student particpate in its gifted pull-out program which typical entails "enrichment" not acceleration.
3. Student receives some "differentiated" school work (i.e., semi-random worksheets) in class (because the courts have determined that a gifted pull-out program is not sufficient by itself).
4. Fuzzy goals and learning outcomes are listed in the student's educational plan which are typically subjective, unquantifiable, and/or untestable.
5. Plan is presented to student's parents for approval without informing them that the district's recommendation is merely a preference and that other options are available tp the student.
I'd characterize this as the school's way of discharging the regulatory burdens of providing gifted education with the minimal amount of work and the minimal amount of additional academic expectations. Instead of the student's needs being paramount as intended by the law; the disctrict's administrative convenience is paramount.
As a parent of a regular education student you basically have no say in how your child is educated in the public school system. You don't agree with the school's choice of fashionable curriculum? Too bad; move to a new a new school district. But once your child is identified as gifted (or "special" at the other extreme) they become statutorily protected. Now the parent does have a say. But unfortunately, most parents willingly (if perhaps unwittingly) sign away this right as soon as they accept the district's recommendation which is, as I described above, designed to specifically appear to be doing something for the student without doing much of anything or being responsible for doing or accomplishing much of anything.
The school's favorite way of accomplishing this goal is to specify academic "enrichment" for the student. So, what is enrichment? It's one of those education weasel words. It could mean almost anything. But I think my definition of enrichment is a good functional definition
Enrichment is not acceleration.
That cuts right to the chase. If the student is receiving enrichment, he's not receiving acceleration. He might be learning more, but that "more" being learned isn't the stuff needed to make it to the next level.
Let's say the gufted student is capable of learning 50% faster than the regular education instructional pace. This means that in two years the student is capable of learning three years of academic content. If the student was in third grade and was being accelerated, he'd be ready to tackle sixth grade level work by the end of fourth grade (2 years). However, if the student were being enriched, he would likely only be prepared to do fifth grade work at the end of fourth grade.
Maybe an illustration would help.
The first three light blue ovals represent how much the regular student needs to learn. The light green circles represent how much our hypothetical gifted student learns in a given year (150%) in an enrichment program. The gifted student is clearly learning a lot more than the regular student for the three years of grades 3-5 depicted. At the end of the those three years, however, the student still is only prepared to do sixth grade work.
Let's contrast this with an acceleration program.
The student has learned the same amount of material, but the learning is focused in the direction of what the student needs to know to progress through the grades. The result is that after the same three years of learning, the accelerated student is ready to do work at grade 7.5 instead of grade 6 as in the enrichment example above.
Acceleration seems, at least to me, to be the preferred course of action for the gifted student. School districts, however, don't see it this way. The vast majority of schools only want to offer enrichment pull-out programs for their gifted students. Why do you suppose this is so?
I think that the reason is that there's increased accountability in accelerating the gifted student. In my example, the gifted student should be ready to do sixth grade level work by the end of 2 years instead of three. If the student isn't ready then something has gone wrong and the student hasn't learned what he was supposed to. Someone is going to be blamed and who wants that aggravation, especially considering these are the kids who should be coasting through the system and Taking up less of the teacher's time, allowing her to focus on the other kids.
The other reason is that acceleration programs present administrative challenges for the school since these gifted kids will have to be separately tracked ot perhaps taught in a different grade for some subjects.
Nonetheless, the statute clearly places the student's needs above the administrative problems of the schools, so this last factor shouldn't be an issue in theory. In practice, you know it is. This is a monopoly we're dealing with and monopolies don't care about their customers -- where else are they going to go? And who cares anyway, the same amount of tax dollars are still going to flow into the coffers every year.