One of the very many frustrations for parents, teachers, and others working with kids on the Autism spectrum is how unhelpful test results can be for this group of students.
Let me explain. A cognitive or academic assessment like the WISC or WJ may tell you something that you did not know your child could do. That is a possibility.
But you may never know what the child cannot do because of the way AS or the Autism spectrum interferes with testing. Some of the subtests are timed, for instance, and if the child gets stuck on a topic, a favorite line from a movie, or just perseverates, the subtest will give you very little in the way of useful information.
Also, depending on the severity, an assessor usually has to bend the rules so much just to get through the testing situation that the results are no longer valid when compared with same ages peers. My shorthand for referencing all of these issues is, "Autistic kids don't come in standardized."
Having said all that, as a middle school teacher, I often hear what holy terrors kids with an autism diagnosis were in elementary school, and find it difficult to believe when I see them in my middle school classroom. They are still autistic, though one of mine may have been mis-diagnosed, and another who wasn't no longer has any kind of plan. But they are doing so much better than they did in elementary school!
Autistic kids do have their challenges with verbal tasks. An autistic kid in a bilingual program is dealing with a double whammy, but taking him out of the bilingual program may not be answer. Every kid is different, and there are so many moving parts to that decision.
