Nice to hear from you again, perse! And also good to hear that your older one eventually did get what he needed in school.
As to #2: Her Lexile is indeed quite high for her age. It's also not crazy for a GT kiddo, hyperlexic or no. That's about where one of ours was at that age--reaching what Metametrics would consider college-ready around third or fourth grade. And that's starting from simple decodables just after the fourth birthday. The Lexile is about where the median entering-7th grader was in the MetaMetrics studies. the iReady score is about where the median entering-8th grader was in the relevant studies. So they match up reasonably well, all things considered. (iReady is more focused on decoding at this age, and Lexiles are about comprehension.)
And math being only a grade or two ahead is likely not only a function of the differential impact of instruction on math (vs reading, which is gated in a fluent decoder mainly by vocabulary and socio-cultural context), but also on the ceiling of the grade two tests. On top of that, there are differences between percentiles (ordinal performance versus age-peers) and grade-level expectations. Consider that the majority (69%) of USA fourth graders read below grade-level on the 2024 NAEP. Most programmatic standardized testing scores reported to parents are taken from tests designed to identify at-risk learners, so the spread below grade-level also is quite a bit more detailed than that above.
Regarding advocacy: If this is the same district, you have the advantage this time of your older child's experience. (I'm one of a sibling group of GT learners, and the younger sibs definitely benefited from parental advocacy for the older sibs.) (And btw, it actually speaks well of your district's commitment to at-risk learners that they are using Fundations as their tier 1 reading curriculum. It's relatively expensive, and labor-intensive training teachers, but it's also highly effective at catching and remediating readers at-risk of dyslexia early, when implemented correctly. This also suggests your district may have some resources to work with...) And on the advocacy front for Fundations, it does include unit assessments at the higher levels (grade 4 & 5), which might be one way to demonstrate to the district that she can move on from it.
And if it's a different district, then you can talk wistfully about what a struggle it was to get the past districts to support your son, and how happy you are to be working with this one instead, since they are so much more student-centered.
For our own children, we haven't had to deal with much of this, as we've homeschooled most of K-12. I have worked in schools for longer than I care to think about, though, and can say a few things, in no particular order:
1. Having a key school staff member as an ally is extremely helpful.
2. Come prepared with win-win solutions-- these respect teachers' time and expertise, and are also presented as strategies that will help them display their own strengths better.
3. If the conversation starts to slide toward how this may affect other students, respecfully but firmly re-focus the conversation on your child.
4. Consider and prioritize the functions and needs that are most impactful for your child, and be willing to compromise on lower-priority items as an act of good faith collaboration.
indigo has a rather comprehensive roundup of crowd-sourced advocacy tips from over the years. Search for "advocacy roundup" and I think it should come up. I know there are links connected to the "advocacy as a non-newtonian fluid" thread.
