Why is my child so behind academically despite having “normal” test scores?

Homeschooling started with the pandemic. My kid lost the last half of kindergarten, and couldn’t focus online when they shifted him there. After that summer, I homeschooled for first grade. He continued for another quarter of second grade, just to ensure they weren’t going to be sending kids home that fall again.

He did fairly well, his test scores coming back to school were slightly above average for a second grader. Then the admins at that school refused to step in and stop bullying, and even suspending my son for standing up for himself. After that we switched schools. He did really well for a new kid in a new school, and this is coming into 5th grade (where elementary ends after 6th grade in this district). His test scores were mostly average, possibly slightly below in reading and math. Nothing too worrisome I thought.

Then after fall break, my son has a mental health meltdown. Refuses to speak about what’s going on, just says he “hates school.” (Obviously dad and I get him a therapist that he’s seeing now.) We decide to switch back to homeschooling because his mental health is what’s most important. I don’t know if he had thought 5th grade homeschooling would be as easy as 1st grade homeschooling, but he is really struggling.

I spoke to his father and he is confused as well because his test scores say he’s pretty average. Dad thought maybe he was dragging his feet and playing it up a bit, but I explained no I saw him truly struggling to grasp concepts and refusing to even attempt to think on what the answer might be when he gets a problem wrong. If he doesn’t understand something immediately, he gets frustrated and just guesses at an answer to get it over with rather than actually thinking and trying. He has some attention issues (diagnosed), but his teachers never requested a special academic program for him or anything.

I don’t understand how his test scores in school reflect what they do. I feel like I’ve been lied to an cheated. Do they do tests in groups with notes or something? This 5th grader does not utilize proper capitalization, punctuate the ends of sentences. He doesn’t understand how commas, quotations, apostrophes, and colons work. His math comprehension should be at the point where he is able to preform certain pre-algebra and geometry problems with relative ease, but he is still struggling on the basics of multiplication and division. There is no way this is “average” comprehension, when the curriculums for elementary school show that he should have been finalizing these core concepts over the past few years.

Submitted November 02, 2024 at 08:54AM by TheOcultist93 https://ift.tt/WmC0Qrf