OK, so I heard back from the GT teacher and actually spoke to her very briefly after school today and I will say that I am cautiously optimistic.
She said that our district and school are dedicated to providing differentiation and that if my DS is showing mastery then he should be provided more complex activities that still adhere to the curriculum content.
However, she recognized that individual teachers may not be fully implementing this and promised to look into my son's situation and find out what is going on in his classroom specifically. Now, I am not sure what she will find, because the descriptions I have gotten from both the teacher and my DS are very vague. But my understanding of the current practice is that the advanced students have to go through what everyone else does (which they do much more quickly of course) and then are given somewhat more complex activities (playing Top It with 2 digit rather than single digit numbers) while the teacher spends more time with the other students. I have never seen a pretest or a post test, or any math activity except for the returned homework which is not even graded. Although, I get a seemingly endless stream of various spelling/literacy/writing work done in class!
I am going to call her again on Monday to follow up, but I am encouraged that she at least said she would look into it and that he should be receiving higher level work (again the question is how much higher). I am fine with enrichment that is deeper rather than more advanced, actually, as long as it truly meets his needs by providing opportunities to exercise a greater degree of reasoning etc. Going from 1 digit to 2 digit addition/subtraction is not my idea of greater depth, though. Especially when he is perfectly capable of doing 3+ digit problems easily.
So hopefully she will be able to get some changes made in the class. We shall see!
