For two years, my son's school had told me he was at grade level on reading, or within the range of normal, when I knew he should have been a good reader by 2nd grade. But the fact is, grade level expectations are so low in the younger grades that there's no way we could use that to judge whether he had a reading disability, which the teachers were doing.
This is so true. A local public school tested my son last year (he attends a private school), and we/his teacher were saying things like, "it's very difficult to get him to stay on-task," and "his handwriting is at a first-grade level (he was in 5th grade)."
Well. When the tester looked at his handwriting, she said it looked okay to her --- he was forming all the letters, only a few of them were backwards, and he was writing sentences. As for the behavior, she observed him in class and said he was absolutely
fine. Then she and another person told us their own stories: they told us about the kids who can barely form letters at 11, much less write complete sentences. They told us about the boy who was lying on the floor during class, trying to slip a sheet of paper through a slit in his desk, and how that boy was "a mild case by our standards."
So even though my son had some dysgraphia at a minimum, his problems were so minor compared to what they see all the time, we all agreed that it would be better for him to stay in the small private school.
It's, I don't know...really sad.
