Thank you, this information helps. I don't know enough about testing to know which tests align or are co-normed with others, which norms are older/newer, etc. I assumed the district had a reason for switching, but in the research I'd tried to do on my own I wasn't finding much useful information.
I have also observed that in the past couple of years, since the identification testing changed, the gifted accelerated program for elementary has fewer participants by nearly half. I suppose it could be that more families are declining the program offer, but my gut tells me that they suddenly only had half as many qualifiers when the testing requirements changed. Now that my younger child is at the grade level for testing, I'm seeing the personal effects of the change among his peers. The new testing caught him in the gifted/accelerated net, but it seems to be leaving out several kids who would be ideal candidates for this program, who clearly need more than the regular classroom can offer. And after my older child's relatively poor performance on Iowa reading last year, I'm just asking myself if this system is flawed. This is a child who is most often 98/99th on MAP and always has been, and upon entering middle school this year got the highest language arts/reading pretest score in the entire 6th grade (out of 378 kids)...but scored 79th percentile on Iowa. But if a lot of districts use this combo and it is generally reliable, I guess it just...is what it is. Any change in the system is going to cause some ripples, and maybe this one just means that the accelerated program shrinks because it's harder for kids to qualify--although I'm not sure why so many are performing lower than their MAP norms on Iowa if it's a grade level test. I may never know! Maybe I should be doubting the validity of MAP instead!
