We had a similar argument with DS's K teacher last year. She knew he was reading but had marked him as "approaching the standard" on letter recognition A-Z because she only tested A-M the first semester. If you put kids at exceeding the standard in the beginning, there isn't a way to show the teacher made them grow... so she wouldn't do it. Never mind that she didn't actually make him grow, it looked like she did on paper.
He's in 1st now and we changed schools for a variety of reasons. His new public school has no hesitation in marking "met the standard" in the first trimester. The teacher even said at back to school night "if your child receives more than 2/3 of the standards in "met" category in the 1st trimester, we will have to talk about whether or not your child even belongs in 1st grade." We're expecting that talk at conferences this week :-)
They won't assess his reading level beyond 4th grade which is fine- they do not want him reading books above 4th grade level in class. I can understand from a teacher's perspective, the amount of trouble it would cause for them to have to screen for content. I don't want my 1st grader reading Twilight just because he can! Instead, they use 4th grade books for him and use a variety of comprehension and language usage materials. Last week he had to find 20 similes in the story, describe the comparison and look up synonyms in the thesaurus. The week before, they were talking about compound words and prefixes and suffixes. I think it's all very useful, high level work so it doesn't bother me in the slightest.
