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> We have had to go to private school because California does not skip grades even though it’s obvious the child doesn’t belong in the grade level for his age.

Be careful what you wish for. Skipping 2nd grade led to bullying hell until I stayed for a second year of 6th.

I think what you want for your kid is to skip N grades ahead in select subjects but otherwise stay in age peer group.

I suspect that won't be an issue anymore, as it is no longer possible to skip grades in public schools in many states.

And hopefully private schools would prevent "bullying hell" if they want all those tuition $$$.

Agree. Social and emotional development is a real thing. I think most students (especially boys) are better off being more challenged in their age-appropriate grade-level than skipping.

This is not true based on research done on kids who were accelerated as far as they needed to.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.4219/jeg-2006-247

When I was going through school the gifted program allowed for kids to skip 1 grade in math and 1 grade in science. I think this was reasonable and didn’t lead to much bullying. Also helped that we had a large gifted program. A math class might’ve been 20-30% gifted kids at any given time.

On the other hand, I skipped three grade levels and feel that it was absolutely the best option for me. I don’t think there’s any one answer here about the best thing to do — it depends entirely on the student, the school, and the grades to be skipped.

Yeah, I’m skeptical about the benefits of skipping lots of grades. If you have money to throw around, hire private tutors to teach them more advanced subjects and let them enjoy the social aspects of school with their peers. Otherwise, what’s the best outcome? The kid spends their entire school years socially isolated from peers who are in different stages of puberty and growth. They enter college at 14/15 and risk missing a lot of what college has to offer besides education. Then, finally, they enter the wage machine at 18-19, having lost a lot of their childhood and now having to behave like adults. Everything may work out and they’ll retire at 40 to live the life they missed, or they may be socially and psychologically scarred by the pressure put on them by others and by themselves throughout their life.

> Skipping 2nd grade led to bullying hell

No it didn't.

Not debating whether bullying happened, but your skip isn't what resulted in a bullying prone and bullying tolerating hellscape.

But it IS what put me into it. Duh.

I’m happy that you were able to work around the state’s horrible treatment of your gifted child, by throwing money at the problem. I’ll probably have to do the same with my children in my Seattle suburb.

The real victims are the kids whose parents can’t afford to do this. It tends to be disproportionately the kids in the very demographics that the left professes to care about. So it’s weird to me that they would choose to do things that make it harder for these groups to have economic mobility.

Any school system is not going to provide any education for him. Just write it off, and take things into your circle of influence. He needs someone to teach him material at his level. Whether it’s a family member, or 2 dedicated hours a day with a tutor.

Now as others have pointed out here intellectual development is only one kind. You may see your son as exempt from certain requirements and activities, when he is really not. If you have dedicated time where his intellectual needs are met you will less tempted to step in and save your son from important life lessons.

It’s difficult to express exactly my experience. I know you are proud and excited for your son. But remember he is only with you for a short time, and being smart and getting degrees and jobs etc is such a small part of having a good life. If you only focus on that part he may have a very hard time and not be able to take advantage of his gifts.

In Seattle there is a strong movement to ban gifted education. The prospect of that becoming fully implemented has caused many politically progressive parents I know to move out to suburbs in some cases and red states in others. Even without bans there has been a tangible dumbing down of the rigor of schooling. And the forced introduction of weird political curriculums like ethnic studies in math (https://www.king5.com/article/news/education/seattle-schools...).

The exodus away from Seattle public schools surprise no one. After all who wants to take such risks with their own child’s education, that they only get try on? Unfortunately I don’t think it will be easily fixed. The school board is full of career activists, much like city and state leadership, and it is reflected in the culture of K-12 schooling. The DEI movement legitimized all of this and gave it cover. Equity made merit a taboo. And reversing those damaging movements will take decades.

As someone who lives in the metro area, Seattle proper is honestly 142 square miles surrounded by reality, and terrified of the idea that somehow, somewhere, San Francisco or Portland might be doing a better job of saying and doing all the fashionable progressive things.

Even Bellevue doesn't seem to be doing the optimal thing. They're losing students and having to close schools as well. Meanwhile, their Chinese immersion school has a huge waitlist. Every Chinese parent and many others wants to send their kids there. It's free, their kids will learn Chinese, and they'll be surrounded by other well-behaved kids with academically-focused parents.

I'm going to try to get my kids into that school, but if they don't get in, it may be private school for us as well.

Your link didn't work. Something like this maybe? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuU4KM9htf0

I'm not this super smart or anything, but I was allowed to skip a grade and the result was hell for me - I was a scrawny kid even in my age group and a year of physical development means a lot at young ages. I was taken out from the environnment of my peers and placed with total strangers who were all told that 'I was special', which didn't put me in a favorable light. I basically had no friends and quite a few enemies for a year before my parents wizened up and took me to a different school.

I'm sorry, California does indeed allow children to skip grades. I also live in California and can think of 2 kids in my son's school who have skipped a grade. It is totally permitted - we've even discussed skipping our son one grade because he too is bored and capable of more, not only in maths but in every subject. We decided against it for social reasons.

That's interesting. My parents were told, in SC and FL, to have me skip a grade or two (not six!), but refused due to the social burden they expected it to put on me.

I'm not entirely happy with where I am at 26. I wonder if I'd be further ahead - or behind - if I had skipped forward.

There was a study done in Australia that showed that radical acceleration for gifted kids resulted in the highest overall satisfaction in life. It sounds like you probably needed further acceleration.

Really? I often hear the opposite, kids I knew who got a bachelors degree at 17 say well now what? What is the rush!

This isn’t about it being a rush. For kids like mine, they NEED it. My son wanted to learn calculus when he was 9 but I refused and instead sent him to outdoor summer camps, sports camps etc. He still doesn’t know calculus because I told him not to rush it and he is resentful but instead he took geometry, number theory etc. He wants to learn at an accelerated pace, it’s not about anyone except for him pushing himself because he needs it.

Yes he needs intellectual stimulation.

But is that going to come from being in 6th grade instead of 3rd grade?

I guess the key is to not just accelerate the kid into a higher grade full of "general population" students. He'd just be surrounded by a different group of mediocre (just older) kids. I think really smart kids need to be surrounded by other really smart kids or their social circle will constantly drag them back to the mean.

I skipped forward a year at Uni. Being academically proficient (≈IQ) and socially proficient (≈EQ) are very different things and I was not wise enough to make good decisions.

I am regularly blown away by the deep social capabilities of some of my smarter friends. For a few years I have been dedicating a lot of thought to social interactions. I waste virtually zero time on past academic interests.

Too many people equate IQ with STEM skills (especially Maths). Hard sciences are much easier to learn than soft skills.

Agreed. I lean towards thinking I would've wound up further behind if I skipped one or more grades, due to the social aspect. Especially given how often I moved.

Keeping the regular pace also allowed me to do a lot more extracurriculars. I started helping with quantum computing research in my freshman year of college and joined a bunch of clubs.

As one of these kids, in Massachusetts, I had my math classes at a desk in the hallway by myself starting in 3rd grade, where I was just given an algebra textbook to read. I reviled the process of math lessons where the teachers just asked me to show the other 3 kids in my quad of desks how to do the lessons... I couldn't understand why they could not just grasp the concepts. It was frustrating for everyone involved, and the solution was worse. By the time I made it to high school I'd learned that: I could read the book and nail the tests, so I never did homework. why bother? Unfortunately they grade homework, I used to skip class because I already knew the material and I didn't want to answer for not doing the homework. I never used the muscles I needed to use for learning, and I was so over it I had trouble participating in the classes that were actually great and I enjoyed. There were AP classes in high school that I never qualified for, and I barely graduated, had to go to summer school every year, so I joined the marines which is probably the only reason the school moved things around so I could graduate.

This was a failure at every level of the education system for me, at a school system with 9/10 ratings. I needed engagement as a young student, I needed to learn and be challenged so I _had_ to study for things, I _had_ to do homework to learn... and by the time the structures where there that supported that I was lost already. There were allusions to a better future, I tested in the 98-99 percentile on the Iowa tests (except in English and spelling, I'm just middle of the bell curve there) so I was fed in Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth in 6th grade, but that never was anything more than a weekend at MIT learning about some truly amazing science, but it didn't seem to go anywhere. I'm sure my own discipline problems, apparent from a very young age, didn't help. It was just too easy to understand that the authorities around me where full of it, poke holes in their logic, see what I could get away with, etc... all because I was bored.

You've got quite a task in front of you, raising your son. I didn't find an outlet for this "gift" until I was in college and started writing code for real... self learning is everywhere in computer science and the problems are vast and difficult, there is always something new to learn and I do it voraciously. The other thing that helped immensely was learning to race motorcycles, it's a task that mandates preparation and planning, diligent practice, getting up when you're knocked down, and the amount of brain power you need to devote to it quiets down the inner loop I have that is always going. When I'm on track everything is quiet.

I hope you've got the resources to send your child to private school, I always imagined that path would have had a different outcome for me. My kids are in private (I'm also in CA) now and I've heard parents with older kids (even in school systems like Kentfield) saying the same thing you're saying about treatment of gifted kids.

Thank you for your story. It’s something I’m hoping to avoid for my son and I’m glad you were able to find a path theiugh programming. Interestingly my son isn’t very interested in programming but he loves math.

He goes to a gifted school with many kids like him so it has been working out well, but the tuition is extremely expensive. We have been making sure he focuses on hard work as opposed to high marks so that he doesn’t learn bad habits.

The article goes over that.

specifically how it wasn't the grade that was the issue, it was the speed of the course material. so once your son catches up, the problems will resurface because of the slow people. just now compounded by the social isolation and lack of physical development in comparison to peers.

Recess isn't socially isolated, class instruction time isn't particularly social, and a variety of classes are not IQ based.

One needs to select a learning environment that can provide skill developing challenge in both IQ-appropriate and socially-appropriate milieus. Note I didn't say "age appropriate", as that's not a real thing, it's a responsibility-abdicating proxy.

What U.S. state has the best resources for kids at the gifted end of the spectrum?

> What U.S. state has the best resources for kids at the gifted end of the spectrum?

Pretty much no state at this point.

That said, specific school districts can be responsive. Usually this is in expensive neighborhoods with relatively well-off residents. These schools serve as de facto private schools even through they are technically public.

Nevada? https://www.davidsonacademy.unr.edu/

> He can’t function in a regular class because he would become bored

My solution was to read books and draw comics in class. I had some teachers that understood, some that didn't.

I think this is increasingly the case everywhere for people who just don't fall into any of the predetermined buckets that whoever designed a particular system has anticipated. People used to be much more flexible and driven by "common sense" (whatever that means to you) in past generations.

Nowadays the most you get back is a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and are then left on your own. I can totally see a modern bureaucrat letting someone die, in a conscious way, because "my job description says that this machine has to be turned off at 7:00pm".

Unless you're mega-wealthy, ofc., in which case society bends to your will with an unprecedented sense of obedience. Whether both effects are independent or related is left for the reader to think about.

> He can’t function in a regular class because he would become bored and would act out and constantly get in trouble.

No student has ever found all their courses interesting. You'd have a behavior problem no matter what level of material is taught.

Don't sweat schooling. It's good for him to be with people his age, and he will be fine long term. Let him do extra curricular that fill his curiosity.

When he gets to college he can really excel, until then just let him go to school and make friends with kids his age.

I understand the sentiment, but you also can’t write off 18 years of development.

The mistake would be assuming public school will be both socially and intellectually fruitful. No man can server two masters. Budget time accordingly.