I guess I don't understand this industry and who are the big dogs that manufacture all these test products.
You may wish to research terms such as common core standards, Pearson, college board, US Department of Education, including their history, direction/trends, and stated end-goals.
While many parents may tend to focus on "what's next" for our kids educationally, it may be important to raise awareness of the overall direction of education as a whole, and how this may be related to
economic systems, including contemporary issues such as the burgeoning national debt. We are in a considerably different set of circumstances than many parents grew up in, therefore the country's economy may be seeking different skills and different types of workers going forward; This is reflected in the educational system, which essentially both prepares and sorts the workers.
Top-performing kids may not receive support/challenge, appropriate curriculum placement/pacing, the company of intellectual peers, or work in their zone of proximal development (ZPD) as the current focus in education may be bringing up the children at the bottom so that all children are performing at the prescribed common core grade-level standard, thereby closing the achievement gap and/or excellence gap.
This may be the situation faced by the OP, whose child began the school year reading at the 99th percentile and did not achieve expected growth throughout the school year.
