Unfortunately for gifted students, the only thing that schools really need to do is teach the state standards, which are geared to "average" for each grade. So if a child is scoring 96th percentile on a test like MAP, they are well above grade level and the school does not need to teach those above-level standards. "individualizing" instruction seems to be optional, unless a student has a disability that makes them test in the below average range (according to our district). So even though I have not seen any progress with DD's writing in about 2-3 years, since she is able to pump out an average score on a test like the WJ, the school can say that they are doing their job and nothing needs to be individualized for her. Of course they CAN write an IEP for a child scoring in the average range (if there are discrepancies between scores), but it's all about doing the bare minimum that the State forces them to do. At the last IEP meeting I passed around the State standards for lang. arts/writing, and people started grumbling about them, saying they are "too hard". According to the State standards, DD is about 2 years behind, but tests like the WJ-ACH don't pick that up, since it only requires the student to write one sentence at a time. The teachers acted like they had never looked at the writing standards before. If I had had a tape recorder, it may have given me evidence for a lawsuit.
In your case, I think your DD is on the right track with a presumably good teacher coming up next year. She will probably quickly catch up to the other high-performing kids if she has any deficiencies.
