Seems that they would come back with "Why? We are going to assess and challenge him in class on an ongoing basis."
I think that's an answer to be welcomed - because if it's true, all your worries are over! Of course, that's only if they are going to keep assessing until they reach a level where they can tell that each child will be challenged, so my response would be something like "That's great. My guess is that my child will assess around 2/3 (or whatever) of the way through 5th grade maths. Can you confirm that you'll test that far if my child is successful at earlier assessments, and give me some idea of what you'll do in that case?"
He's capable of learning independently, but someone whould have to hand him the work and tell him what pages to look at. He read the Life of Fred book independnetly, but he's not going to work through a math text book w/o some direction. I could do that, though. I could parse out the work if the school would let him have a quiet place to work.
Sounds promising. FWIW we're trying something similar with my DS6. So far (4 days in!), the main problem is that he has no skills to get himself unstuck or go on, when he reaches something he doesn't know how to do. So at that point, he just stops, and stares at the question he can't do until told it's time for a different subject. Argh :-) Yours is a bit older though, and even with mine, I'm hoping he can be induced to learn not to do that!
