Grade skipping has drawbacks

Public education is a bureaucracy known for its red tape. Between entrance requirements, student records, standardized testing, curriculum guidelines, assessment standards and much more, today's public education policies seem to be built on a foundation of paper-and lots of it. That is why it was so surprising to find out Georgia's third largest school system, Dekalb County, has just started to flesh out procedures for students to skip a grade-or accelerate, as educators call it.

Not that Dekalb has not allowed students to accelerate in the past; it was just a difficult process that had to be parent-initiated. Dekalb should be commended for fleshing out a grade skipping policy that is fair across all of its schools, but they and other educators need to consider whether they are advocating acceleration because it is the best thing for bright students or because it is the easiest, cheapest option for school administrators.

Currently Georgia education policy is governed by the national "No Child Left Behind Act," (a policy that has certainly added to that paperwork nightmare), which requires school systems to develop standards for core subjects and to test how well students meet these standards. Public schools have gone to great lengths because of this law to improve the services they offer to at-risk and low-performing students, but in return services to high-achieving and gifted students are sometimes lost. To be fair, with a limited budget it is hard to justify funding a robotics team over a tutoring program for students who can't read. Still, should schools allocate more or different resources to gifted students than they currently provide?

Proponents of gifted education argue that although it is important for no child to be left behind, reaching the needs of the top students is just as important. Of the 1,553,437 students enrolled in grades K-12 in the state of Georgia for the 2004 to 2005 school year, almost 10 percent were enrolled in some type of gifted education. However, of the $14,363,970,000 dollars allocated for education in Georgia that same year, less than one percent went toward gifted education. Like grade skipping, not all gifted services have to cost a lot of money, but some options certainly do.

According to the Georgia Department of Education, the type of programs that are provided to meet the needs of gifted students in Georgia range from completely separate schools to pullout enrichment activities for as little as an hour a week. Obviously, a separate school is going to be expensive, but even enrichment programs, which help foster creativity, are expensive compared to just moving a student forward in school. At the high school levels, most other gifted education programs are dropped completely by the eleventh grade with Advanced Placement (AP) courses or college courses being the only services offered, both of which are examples of single subject acceleration.

AP classes are a great option, but they do not meet all the needs of gifted students. Single subject acceleration does recognize that a student may be advanced in one or several subject areas, but not all. Dekalb administrators should remember that being gifted doesn't mean being gifted at everything as they put the finishing touches on grade skipping policies. Because grade skipping is cheap (all the school has to do is move the student up to the next set of teachers), it could be easy for money- and time-crunched educators to push acceleration as the method to help gifted students, even though it may not be the best option to provide them academic challenge and continuous progress in their talent area, as well as to foster creativity.

The reason I am concerned about Dekalb and other school systems standardizing grade skipping is not that the policy itself is bad but that the policy might be overused. Georgia constantly earns high gifted education services rankings. Programs to identify gifted students and provide educational services for them are required in 24 states; however only six states, including Georgia, fully fund gifted programming at the state level.

This state has had a gifted education program since 1958 and defines "gifted" based on multiple criteria besides achievement on intelligence tests, as has historically been the case in the United States. Though things seem to be improving, the state is still near or at the bottom for most education rankings. It would be a shame to progress quickly and broadly with grade skipping programs that may jeopardize one of the few areas of education where we are recognized as the cream of the crop.