Are We Measuring Academic Ability or the Ability to Afford an Education? A Teacher’s Observation
It was the first morning of standardized testing, and I was standing at the front of my seventh-grade classroom holding a timer like it was a stopwatch. The room smelled of 2 pencils and floor cleaner. Kids were bubbling in their names, and the only sounds were the click of pens and the hum of the air conditioner. Then Alexis raised her hand.
“What does ‘gala’ mean?” she asked, her voice barely carrying across the row of desks.
I walked over and whispered, “A fancy party. Usually to raise money for something.”
She nodded and wrote something down, but I saw her brow tighten. The reading passage described a teenager volunteering at a winter gala: there were chandeliers, bidding paddles, evening gowns. Jason, whose parents had taken him to more than a few charity dinners, read it like a familiar story. Alexis stared at the word like it was a locked door.
The test was supposed to measure how well she could read and analyze. But at that moment, it was measuring whether she’d ever been to a gala.
That afternoon, I went through the test booklet again. The vocabulary wasn’t hard in an academic sense. Words like “banquet,” “sponsor,” and “benefactor” were all within a seventh grader’s decoding range. But the contexts were telling. There was a question about a family debating whether to pay for summer camp or a new washing machine. An essay prompt about the value of museum memberships. Math problems about calculating interest on bonds.
Nothing about splitting rent. Nothing about bus passes. Nothing about the math of making a dollar stretch to the end of the month.
I’ve talked about the achievement gap in faculty meetings for years. But in that classroom, I saw it more clearly than any data chart: the test wasn’t just measuring what kids had learned. It was measuring what their parents could afford to show them. Call it background knowledge. Call it cultural capital. Either way, it costs money.
I’ve taught kids like Marcus, who could take apart a broken laptop and put it back together but couldn’t explain what “profit margin” meant. And I’ve taught kids like Hailey, who had never missed a meal but still struggled with equivalent fractions. Their differences showed up on test scores, sure. But to call that difference “academic ability” felt like a language trick.
A week later, I sat in a parent-teacher conference with Marcus’s mother. She was a single parent who worked nights at a nursing home. She told me, with a kind of quiet pride, that Marcus had taught himself programming using an old library computer. “But his scores,” she said, shaking her head. “They say he’s below grade level in reading.”
I wanted to tell her the tests didn’t know everything. But I also knew she’d heard that line before. What helped more was showing her his response to a creative writing prompt—he’d written a story about a robot that had to decide whether to save its own memory chip or the family pet. It was far better than anything his test scores suggested. She smiled, but she still looked worried. And she should be, because those scores determine the classes he gets placed into.
“I can’t help him with the reading stuff,” she said. “I work until nine. And I didn’t graduate high school myself.”
I didn’t have a neat answer for that.
What I do have are small adjustments I’ve made over the years. They don’t fix the system, but they help in the day-to-day. When I introduce a reading passage about a fundraiser, I don’t assume everyone knows what a gala is. I pull up photos on my phone—images of people in suits, auction paddles going up, a buffet table with ice sculptures. We talk about why someone would host an event like that. I ask the kids who’ve been to something similar to explain it in their own words. It takes seven minutes, but it levels the starting line before we read.
I’ve also rewritten a lot of my own test questions. Instead of “A company owns a fleet of vehicles,” I’ll say “A delivery service has twenty cars.” Instead of “A family travels abroad to visit historical landmarks,” I’ll say “A family goes to another city to see an old church.” It doesn’t make the question easier. It just removes the hidden requirement of having flown on a plane.
For parents who feel blindsided by test results, I have two pieces of advice. First: remember that a low score is not a diagnosis of your child’s potential. It’s a snapshot of how well they can navigate the specific experiences and vocabulary that the test writers chose to include. I’ve seen kids move from “below basic” to honors in one year, not because they suddenly got smarter, but because they had a teacher who never assumed they knew what “inference” meant without explicit practice.
Second: talk about everything, even the ordinary things. You don’t need a museum membership to build vocabulary. A trip to the grocery store can teach more than a worksheet if you narrate it: “This says ‘nonfat.’ What do you think that means?” A walk down the street is a chance to discuss “renovation” when you see a house being fixed up. If you can’t afford a vacation, watch a documentary with your kid, or call a relative who lives in another state and let your child ask them ten questions. The stuff of reading comprehension is not exotic. It’s the accumulation of conversations about the world.
I don’t have a tidy ending for this. The standardized tests aren’t going away, and I haven’t solved the gala problem. Alexis scored in the middle percentile that spring. Jason scored in the high nineties. I can’t tell you she was “smarter” than him, and I can’t say she wasn’t. The test told me what she could do with the material it gave her—material shaped by a world she didn’t live in.
What I can do is keep asking what we’re really measuring. I can keep looking at the questions and noticing who they’re built for. And I can keep trying to make my classroom a place where the background a child brings isn’t a hidden requirement for success, but just another thing we build on together.
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