When DS was in first grade, we had a RazKids account (given through the school but you can also sign up on your own, whether there is a free trial or not, I don't know). When I got the line about his "comprehension" and "making inferences" and all of that, I printed out his quiz results. The quizzes are supposedly testing things like making inferences and other reading standards. The program tells you what each question is testing and whether the kid got it right or wrong. He was doing a level T or something on RazKids and had very good accuracy on the quizzes, meanwhile the teacher was giving him books that were way below a T. Now granted, the level system wasn't exactly the same but I don't think most teachers even realize that. I sent in a summary of his quiz results for the higher levels and after that the teacher stopped talking about his troubles with "making inferences". My point---if you have anything like that at all, which documents reading ability at a higher level, then you have evidence that their own assessment results must be incorrect. You can also find flunecy tests online and you could give that to your child (to calculate things like correct words read per minute...F&P has guidelines for each letter).
I also had Woodcock Johnson Ach. reading results which were high, and shared those with the teacher (she used to be a sp.ed teacher so luckily had some understanding of what those results meant, and the grade level equivalents). I don't think it's worth it to pay out of pocket for expensive tests, but just think about what evidence you may already have. Does the school do MAP or other standardized achievement testing for reading?
It's an uphill battle because I think the teachers are brainwashed, or else their hands are tied.
There is research article showing that gifted kids achievement scores for reading (MAP) actually go up the same during the summer, as the school year because in school they are reading below their level (basifcally they are not learning anything in school beyond what they would learn reading on their own).
https://www.nwea.org/content/uploads/2014/08/Data-Award-Karen-Rambo-Research-Brief_0.pdfHere is the conclusion:
" I hypothesized that gifted students would
grow more slowly during the school year
than average students but more quickly than
average students over the summer. In
reading, I basically saw identical trajectories
for gifted students during the school year
and during the summer. And the growth
during the school year was much less for
gifted students than average students.
Whatever these students did in the summer
was as effective at increasing their reading
skills as their time in school and that
increase was still less than the typical
increase experienced by an average student.
While this is what I hypothesized, I was
surprised at how dramatic the results were. Educators can do a couple of things to
address the slower growth from gifted
students during the school year. First, they
can make sure that students are reading at
challenging levels. We should be pushing
these kids to read more difficult text challenging
them. Secondly, we should
seriously consider accelerating students into
higher grades so that they will automatically
encounter more difficult text. Also,
accelerating advanced students in
mathematics also makes a lot of sense given
the slower growth rate for gifted students in
mathematics."
I sent this to one of the teachers saying "Hey, isn't this interesting?!" Never got a response from that teacher, but she did allow DS to bring in his own books.
