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I'm basing my fears on our history with the school. We live in an area where an anti-skip policy is in writing on the school district website. The past assessment by them seemed to possibly be an exercise in justifying their position that no kindergartner would ever be allowed to go straight to first. The last TAT team meeting, in mid-November (that's how long it took them to move on assessing him), ended with the special ed. teacher telling us that not every child was academically gifted, but that our son might turn out to be gifted in the performing arts, based on his status as class clown. This year they've mostly just given him worksheets to do on his own time.

I'm not really against further testing, and it seems like if he will stay in this school system he will have to learn to deal with the MAP. I just don't want a repeat performance of him giving an underwhelming performance with a school psychologist who is frank about her lack of experience testing young gifted children, and whose results cannot be fully computed because of an "abnormally significant discrepancy" among the subtest scores. (Note that in retrospect I think she had a very tough job testing our son, with his avoidance issues, for the first time in his life.) I guess it helps that the MAP is computerized. How hard could it be on him?

Your suggestions are great, thank you. I will see what the wife says (she just got home).

ETA: The wife feels that they're trying to set him up for failure. I guess neither of us are optimists. :| This does feel like a repeat of last time. But I don't know how we can really refuse.

ETA: We feel that they can only be doing one of two things: casting about for a way to shoot down the test results (in which case we may still let him take the MAP), or getting ready to accelerate him using their preferred tools to make sure he has hit all the points on their curriculum. If the latter, they should be able to tell us up front. So we will simply ask what the goals are and play it by ear. Thanks to all.