Hello everyone. I haven't been on for ages, as three small boys and life give me a hard time keeping my head above water, but I found this board really helpful two years ago when my oldest son was utterly melting down over school (got a lot of helped, skipped a grade, things are tolerable). Now I have a friend whose son reminds me a lot of mine, who is having all the usual problems with school, for two years now, and is getting weepy, begging not to go to school, etc. Losing all that love of learning. He was writing and reading out loud poems on the planets in pre-K, but he's particularly gifted in math - he was adding easily at 3, multiplying and dividing before kindergarten -but he hasn't been challenged at all since then. The school is appallingly anti-gifted and expect this 7yo boy just to sit there; the family is applying for a magnet school in another town but the chances of getting in are low. The school is not about to test him with anything the Davidson would accept, and testing privately isn't really an option.
My friend just got Aimsweb and DRA scores for her son that were apparently well above average, but we can't find a scale online that would tell us what they MEAN. We know Aimsweb, at least, is meant to catch kids falling through the cracks. Do they say anything about what level the kid is actually at? He got something like a 29 on the reading DRA and a 50 on the Aimsweb math. But other than that it's well above average, we don't know what it means. If anything, given that whole not-geared-toward-assessing excellence problem so many of these tests have.
I'd appreciate any help you can give helping me help my friend interpret this (and figure out a way to help her kid!) Even though I've been through it in my school, I'm having a real hard time trying to figure out how to help her, and seeing her son inch closer to the breakdown my son had is awful.
Does having private testing help break a really recalcitrant school into action?
thanks very much for reading this!
Jenny
