Yes, school must have been very interesting for this young man, and not necessarily in a good way. The good news is, chicks dig men with superior verbal ability who know about struggle. If he volunteers to wash dishes, even better!
I've going to be seriously oversimplifying here to try and explain where the school is coming from. The WISC tests cognitive ability, which is assumed to be constant. The WJ-3 tests academic achievement, which varies all over the place. As part of an IDEA evaluation, they would be looking for a specific learning disability: a gap where the academic achievement is lower than the cognitive potential. That's what you might call underachievement, and that's what Special Education can do something about.
He's got a double whammy of low processing speed and low working memory. One of those makes school more difficult than we want it to be for kids. Two of those makes it freakin' hard.
What we see in your son's profile might be called overachievement. He has leveraged his superior verbal ability in order to do more for himself than special education could reasonably hope to do. Let me underscore this: what he has achieved in school so far is a remarkable accomplishment that we would not normally expect for someone with this cognitive profile, and we need to give him credit for that.
If I were his teacher, and I wanted to call on him, I might both work out a secret non-verbal cue (if I come by and tap on your desk, I will call on you for the next question) and be prepared to wait about 30-60 seconds for a reply from him. In a typical middle or high school classroom environment, 5 seconds is an uncomfortable silence. But when I gave an academic assessment to a kid with a similar cognitive profile, the rules let me wait forever for an answer, and I often got a correct one.
BTW, the doc would be in serious hot water with the test publishers if he did provide you with copies of the test.
