Word: iowa
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...Iowa study, which carries a similarly alarming title, A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students, says exceptional children are kept with age-mates because most educators believe, incorrectly, that grade skipping will endanger these kids socially and academically. The report also says schools don't want to upset slower kids by removing their apt peers...
...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...
Andrew Fowler, 17, is typical of grade skippers. After vaulting over first grade in Ames, Iowa, 11 years ago, he was worried about leaving friends behind. The first year "was kind of hard," he says, but "by the end of the second year, I was fine ... It wasn't like I didn't see all the other people I knew ever again." Fowler, who just started Cornell College in Iowa, sounds as though he may not have accelerated fast enough. "It was kind of boring throughout elementary school," he says. "In middle school, it began to get more challenging...
...that more obvious to school administrators? Consider the case of Davin Gros. Davin is a rangy, sweet, brilliant kid who lives with his mom, stepdad and three siblings on a remote stretch of Iowa cornfields outside Thornburg (pop. 91). Davin, who turns 15 this week, has blindingly blue eyes and blondish-brown hair that he colors jet black. The day we met was a Thursday, but Davin was at home. After a long struggle with the school system, his mom Laura Knipfer now home schools...
Despite earning strong scores on his Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) in Grade 3, Davin wasn't invited to join the school's talented-and-gifted (TAG) program until the following year--an oversight Knipfer attributes to the family's social standing in a small town. Laura runs a day-care service in their home, and her husband Russell is a truck driver. "We're low income, and I'm not in the local political game," she says. (School superintendent Jody Gray denies this and says Davin was enrolled in TAG as soon as the school recognized his gifts...