Acceleration.

Acceleration is perhaps one of the most misunderstood practices in education, especially with respect to its potential consequences for students who experience it. Before discussing the myths that have grown up around acceleration, we should define what it is and describe some of the forms it can take.

Acceleration refers to any of a number of curricular and administrative modifications that permit students to reach educational goals at a faster than usual rate or an earlier than usual age. It is a challenge to the lock-step organization of American education that dictates where a child should be in the curriculum in a certain subject area on the basis of his or her birth date. Deviations from the age and grade lock step are rare and usually represent hard-won battles on the part of parents, teachers, and other advocates for gifted students.

The best known form of acceleration is grade skipping. As most people know, this involves bypassing a school grade altogether. This is probably best done at a natural transition point. For example, moving from the end of fourth grade, the next-to-last grade in elementary school in many districts, directly to sixth grade, the first year of middle school, could be a less disruptive way to accelerate a child than skipping fourth grade. However, other considerations, such as when the need to accelerate presents itself, the child's emotional and physical maturity, the child's attachment to his or her friends, and the attitudes of the receiving teacher are among the factors to weigh.

Another form of acceleration is early entrance. This involves entering preschool, kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, or college at an earlier age than is typical. Early entrance to kindergarten and college are probably the most common among these options. Obviously, early entrance often requires grade skipping.

Special-progress classes are a form of group acceleration. For example, special progress classes could involve groups of bright students in the same school district spending 2 years in middle school instead of the usual 3, completing the requirements of grades 6, 7, and 8 in that time and moving on to high school 1 year ahead of most of their age peers. Classes of this type, since they involve group acceleration, run less of a risk of being socially disruptive for the students accelerated. Unfortunately, they are rare.

Ungraded schools and multiage classes were, conceptually at least, popular in the 1960s and early 1970s, but even then they were more frequently talked about than implemented. The idea is a simple and logical one: students progress through the curriculum at a rate that is natural and appropriate for them, some moving quickly, some slowly, some lingering at certain points where additional work is needed. However, the logic of this approach was never much of a match for the rigidity of American education, where the assembly line moves at a constant pace and tolerates few deviations from the production schedule. Dispensing with the age-based lock step altogether has always been too radical a move for most educators. And it must be admitted that the administrative and record-keeping demands can be daunting. Intriguing as ungraded schools may seem, they are likely to remain rare.

Subject-specific acceleration is probably the most common form of acceleration. This occurs when a student is clearly well ahead of his or her classmates in a subject area, mathematics being the most common. The teacher of the heterogeneous classroom may realize that, even if he or she groups for instruction, the highest group does not begin to meet the child's needs. Therefore, an arrangement will be made for the child to leave, say, his or her second grade class in order to take mathematics with students in a fourth grade class. Among the advantages of subject-specific acceleration is the fact that it is temporary and leaves the child whose profile is uneven with his or her age peers most of the time. In addition, it is subject-focused and does not assume that the child needs acceleration across the board, and it is based on demonstrable advancement in the content and skills of the curriculum in the subject in question.

Other forms of acceleration exist, but delineating them involves playing variations on a limited number of themes, most of which have been sounded above. Let us turn, then, to the question of whether acceleration is harmful to children.

The infrequent use of acceleration suggests that most teachers and administrators subscribe to the belief that acceleration is either harmful or dangerous for children, especially emotionally and socially. Ironically, however, the large body of research on the effects of acceleration shows clearly that acceleration is not harmful, at least not inevitably. We qualify that last statement with the word inevitably because we believe that acceleration should not be viewed as a panacea and that, like all attempts to do good, handled badly it can have negative consequences.

There are some children who should not be accelerated, especially those whose pace of learning is accommodated comfortably within that of the 180-day-per-year curriculum and for whom the only impetus for accelerating comes from a parent who wants his or her child to move ahead of his or her age peers. This is the danger that David Elkind calls our attention to in his book The Hurried Child (1981). Elkind's concern, that children should not be expected to develop according to adult demands but according to the dictates of their individual developmental trajectories, is an appropriate one. It is also an argument for acceleration for academically precocious children. For just as pushing a child is wrong, holding back a child is wrong as well; both involve imposing an unnatural pace derived from adult expectations.

What the research shows us is that when children are accelerated, they rarely suffer the emotional distress and social isolation that so many fear. This is not difficult to understand when one realizes that it has been applied in response to a problematic situation: a child bored in school, a teacher realizing that he or she cannot provide for the child's needs in a given class room, a child acting out in response to being asked to "learn" something he or she has learned years ago. Thus, acceleration is almost never the disruption of an idyllic childhood but a response to a situation in which a child is unhappy. Adjusting the curriculum for a child who is languishing in an inappropriate learning situation is more likely to relieve than to create emotional stress.

So we have a situation, perhaps unparalleled in American education, in which the majority of educational practitioners hold strong views about an educational practice and the overwhelming preponderance of evidence in a large research literature contradicts those views. The articles that follow help to dispel the myths and misconceptions that have come to surround acceleration and support the argument that this provision can be of great benefit to gifted students and should be given greater consideration in our schools.

REFERENCE

Elkind, D. (1981). The hurried child: Growing up too fast too soon. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.