What I Learned When My Daughter’s Test Scores Jumped After Switching Schools
I was folding mismatched soccer socks on the coffee table last week when my 11-year-old Lila tossed her end-of-year state testing envelope down, grabbed her bike helmet, and yelled over her shoulder that she was meeting her friend at the park. She didn’t even wait to see the numbers. I opened it and stared for a full minute: 92nd percentile in reading, 88th in math. A year and a half earlier, at our neighborhood zoned school, she’d scored in the 31st and 36th percentiles respectively. I’d spent months worrying she needed extra tutoring, that she was falling too far behind to catch up. Then we switched schools, and everything shifted faster than I ever expected.
It’s not that our old school was bad. Most of the kids on our block go there, and my friends with outgoing kids love it. But by the middle of Lila’s fourth grade year, she was coming home with a stomach ache four out of five school days. She’d slump at the kitchen table after school, push her math worksheet around the placemat, and not say a word about her day. One night she cried for 20 minutes because she’d forgotten her lunch box, and it all spilled out. She said her class had 28 kids, she sat in the back row, and the teacher regularly mixed up her name with the other L that sat two seats over. By the time she worked up the courage to raise her hand to answer a question, the teacher had already called on three other kids who’d jumped in first. She got a C on a book report about Charlotte’s Web, a book she’d read three times for fun on her own, just because she refused to do the extra credit diorama. She wanted to write an extra page about how Charlotte’s friendship wasn’t about being perfect, and the teacher didn’t have time to read it.
We didn’t switch because we wanted a “better” school. We switched because she kept saying she felt invisible, and the stomach aches weren’t going away. The smaller public charter 10 minutes from our house had a mid-year opening, it didn’t cost anything extra, and it capped classes at 18 kids. That was the only big difference, really. No fancy STEM labs, no fancy test prep, just smaller classes.
The first month was unremarkable. She still didn’t raise her hand much, still forgot her homework once a week, still got a couple B-minuses on in-class assignments. Then after three months, her first report card came home with Bs across the board, and a note from her teacher that read, “Lila has really thoughtful responses when I check in one-on-one. She’s sharing more every week.” By the end of that first year, her scores had jumped almost 30 points overall.
I’ve had a lot of parents ask me what the new school did differently, if we started some fancy tutoring after switching, what secret trick we found. The truth is, it wasn’t anything fancy. It was three small changes that any school can make, even if you can’t switch schools like we did.
First, the teacher waits for her to answer. Lila is a slow processor. She needs an extra 10 seconds to sort through her thoughts before she can speak. In a class of 28, 10 seconds is an eternity. The teacher moves on, Lila puts her hand down, and stops trying after a while. In her new class, the teacher knows this, and she just pauses. If Lila doesn’t want to answer out loud, the teacher will check in with her after class or while she’s walking around grading work, and write down her response. For parents stuck in big classes, you don’t have to switch to ask for this. I tell people to just email your kid’s teacher and say, “My child needs a little extra time to answer questions. Can you wait a beat before moving on when they don’t respond right away?” It takes no extra time, just a small shift in habit.
Second, they stopped punishing her for moving. At the old school, Lila got three write-ups in one semester for “excessive movement.” She’d get up to sharpen her pencil twice in one class period, or lean over to tie her shoe mid-instruction, and it was marked as disruptive. She spent half the day anxious about getting in trouble, so she couldn’t focus on the work in front of her. At the new school, the teacher just kept an extra pencil at her desk for her, and told her she could stand at the back of the room during whole group instruction if she wanted to. No more write-ups, no more anxiety. If you have a wiggly kid, this is an easy fix to ask for: an extra pencil at their desk, permission to get a drink without raising their hand, a stability ball instead of a chair if you can bring one in. It takes two minutes to arrange, and it removes a huge distraction.
Third, they grade for what she knows, not just what she turns in the way they want it. The Charlotte’s Web diorama thing stuck with me. Lila isn’t big on crafts, but she loves writing. Her new teacher lets kids pick how they show their learning: you can do a diorama, or a written essay, or a recording of you talking about the book. That means she can play to her strengths while she’s still building other skills.
I don’t tell this story to push switching schools on everyone. It’s a huge disruption, it’s not an option for most people, and I felt guilty for months about pulling her out and “rocking the boat.” But the big takeaway for me is that low scores don’t always mean your kid can’t do the work. More often than not, it means the environment doesn’t fit how they learn.
Lila still isn’t the kid that raises her hand every five minutes. She still forgets to turn in homework sometimes, and she still walks around the classroom during quiet reading. She doesn’t get stomach aches on Sunday nights anymore, though, and she begs me to take her to the library every Saturday to pick up new animal nonfiction. Next year she starts middle school, and we’ll probably have to adjust all over again. Right now, this works. That’s enough for me.
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