A Teacher’s Perspective: Testing What Students Know, or What Their Families Can Pay For?
The first time I noticed the gap wasn’t during a state assessment or a standardized test. It was on a random Tuesday in October, during a routine quiz on cellular biology. My ninth-grade students were fifteen minutes into the period, and I was circulating the room, peeking over shoulders to see who was carefully labeling the mitochondria diagram. When I got to Marcus, he wasn’t writing. His paper was blank, save for his name at the top. I leaned down and whispered, “You got this. What do you see in that drawing?”
He looked up, frustrated. “I know what it is, Ms. Delgado. It’s the powerhouse of the cell. I know the whole thing. I just don’t know what it’s called on this test. The word bank says ‘mitochondrion’ but I thought it was ‘mitochondria.’ So I freaked out and froze.”
I told him to just write one down. “You’re overthinking it,” I said. “Pick one, we move on.”
But later that afternoon, as I graded those quizzes, I couldn’t shake that moment. Marcus had the concept. He explained it to me out loud perfectly. Yet, on the paper, in the formal setting of a graded quiz, he missed it because of a vocabulary suffix. That was when the idea hit me: what are we actually measuring here? Are we measuring the ability to learn and understand, or are we measuring something else entirely—like the kind of test-prep tutoring someone had access to in seventh grade?
That thought has followed me around ever since. It’s the quiet suspicion many teachers carry but rarely say out loud because it sounds like an excuse. But it isn’t an excuse. It’s the truth. We have built an education system that often functions as a sorting mechanism, not for innate intelligence, but for economic stability.
When I grade a stack of essays, I can usually tell within the first few paragraphs which students have English teachers at home and which ones have parents working double shifts. This isn’t a judgment on those parents—it’s an observation of reality. The child whose mother is a literacy coach can articulate their thesis statement because they hear that vocabulary at the dinner table. The child whose father works nights does not have that same exposure. They might have a fantastic, original idea, but they struggle to package it in the academic jargon we’ve deemed “mastery.”
This is where the “affordability” part of the question really starts to bite. It’s not just about private tutors. It’s about the economic capacity to provide a quiet room, a stable internet connection, or a parent who is physically present to enforce a bedtime. The standardized tests we administer don’t just measure “college and career readiness”—they measure the accumulation of years of resources. Did your kid have a summer in a STEM camp, or did they have a summer spent navigating an unruly neighborhood? Both teach valuable life skills, but only one of those experiences shows up on the SAT.
I remember a conversation with a parent at a back-to-school night a few years ago. She was a single mom, a nurse, and she was sobbing in the hallway over her son’s progress report. “He used to love school,” she said. “He wants to be an engineer. I bought him all these pop-sci books. But he keeps failing your advanced math class. I don’t understand it.” We sat and talked for a while. It turned out her son was in my Algebra II class, and he was failing. He failed because the homework required him to watch Khan Academy videos alone in his room, but his apartment only had one bedroom, and he shared it with his little sister who needed the light to sleep. He was doing his equations on the kitchen counter on a tablet with a cracked screen, getting distracted by the light from the TV in the living room.
We don’t have a code for that when grading. There is no box to check for “lacks quiet space” or “shares learning environment with chaotic variables.” So we mark them a D- and move them along.
The practical part of me wants to say that the system is too big to change, and that we just have to make do. But I’ve realized that surviving within the system is different than accepting it. There are small shifts we can make in our own classrooms and homes that strip away the “ability to afford” factor and get closer to measuring actual ability.
In my classroom now, I do a lot fewer “pop quizzes” and a lot more “pre-announced performance tasks.” I give them the study guide a week in advance. The difference might seem subtle, but performance tasks require sustained effort and allow for the “affordability gap” to shrink. A student who knows exactly what will be on a culminating project can work on it bit by bit, even if they don’t have a tutor. They can watch a video on their phone at the bus stop. They can ask me for help during lunch. With a pop quiz, you are essentially testing the student’s working memory and their ability to cram the previous night—an ability heavily correlated with having a stable, quiet environment and access to caffeine in the morning.
At home, this translates to a shift in how we talk about grades. Instead of asking a kid, “What did you get on the test?” I often suggest parents ask, “What was the biggest obstacle to you showing what you know?” It’s a subtle change in language, but it reorients the conversation. It moves the focus from a simple numerical judgment to a discussion of environmental hurdles. Maybe they didn’t understand the prompt. Or maybe they were too hungry to focus. Or maybe we just walked into a test right after a fire drill, and the sensory overload was too much. These are all different issues that require different solutions, and none of them are solved by yelling about a grade.
Every Friday, I let Marcus—and all of my students—use sticky notes on their desks for vocabulary. They can write any terms they want, provided they hand in the sticky note attached to the test. We call it “memory assistance.” At first, the department head raised an eyebrow. But the results were undeniable. Students who understood the concepts but struggled with recall—often those with limited access to flashcards or review apps—could now demonstrate their knowledge. The students who knew the material cold were still acing it, and the students who relied on last-minute memorization were finally showing the higher-order thinking they had all along.
This isn’t about dumbing things down. It’s about looking at the test itself and asking, “Does this test require the material, or does it require a specific cultural background and a bankroll?” If a student can explain the concept of a metaphor verbally but freezes when asked to find it in a poem because the poem uses British English vocabulary they’ve never heard, have I measured their analytical ability? Or have I measured their exposure to Brit lit?
The longer I teach, the more I think it’s the latter. We claim to measure proficiency, but we are often just measuring privilege—the privilege of having the time, the money, and the mental peace to prepare for the specific hoops we set out.
I don’t have a tidy answer for how to fix the whole system. I still teach to the standards. I still assign grades. But the moment I stopped believing that a grade is an exact measurement of intellect, I became a better teacher. I started looking at the work as data about the environment, not just data about the child. That is a distinction that matters, especially when you’re looking across the room at a student like Marcus, who has all the raw brilliance but just didn’t know which way to spell the word that morning. I want to make sure we catch the kids who know the answer, but just can’t afford to show it in the way the bubble sheet demands. We’re still grading them, but at least now we know what we are actually grading.
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