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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]I'm just trying to keep the facts straight. Whether having 20% of the student body designated as Level IV and 25% receiving level IV services is a good thing or a bad thing is an entirely different debate. It's also a huge distortion to act as if 20% of the student population is within the top 2% intellectually. I'll freely admit that my AAP child is a bright, motivated student, but isn't gifted under any strict definition. That child seems to be very middle of the pack in AAP. The only reason she "needs" AAP is that all of the other similarly bright, motivated, non-gifted children are also in AAP. It's not necessarily a bad thing that AAP casts a very broad net and gives expanded curriculum to so many kids, but it should be acknowledged that it is a very broad net.[/quote]

This has been my experience with my AAP kid, too. He's intelligent. I don't think he falls into the vague category called "gifted," though. About 80% of his AAP class is similar: intelligent but probably not in need of special services in the form of AAP.

I'm truly grateful for the expanded curriculum, additional teacher one-on-one time, and creative freedom he receives in AAP. I wish other kids who weren't in AAP received those opportunities, too, and I wish there wasn't this sad, status-seeking race every year to get our kids into the program.[/quote]

I was in a "Gifted and Talented" program in elementary school, there were a grand total of 8 of us in the program for all of the grades eligible to participate 3rd-6th grades. We did not have special classes, we were doing computer programming on a bunch of Apple IIe computers 2 hours a week.  None of the 8 of us were being challenged academically in our school, we were not challenged in High School either and i know for a couple of us at least College was not very challenging either.  One of the things I really like about the program was that the teacher never treated us like we were better than others, she pointed out that things were easier for us so she wanted to try to challenge us in other ways.  We were also encouraged to be a resource (not what she called it at the time) for our fellow students when they were struggling.  Not surprising to me, while we all finished in the top 10 percent of our graduating classes not a single one of was in the top 5, none of us cared about grades we only wanted to learn the material.  As a parent of a rather bright child who sees it from a different perspective now, that must have driven our teachers crazy.  [/quote]

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