Are We Measuring Academic Ability or the Ability to Afford an Education?
Maya slid her math test across my desk before I’d even put down my coffee. Ninety-four percent. She’d been nervous about it all week, texting me questions at 8 p.m. the night before, and now here she was, relieved and a little smug.
I was happy for her. I was also thinking about the tutoring center two blocks from school, the one with the laminated sign in the window advertising “Test Prep, All Subjects, $60/hour.” Maya’s mom had mentioned it at conferences, almost apologetically, like she knew it wasn’t fair. Maya’s tutor had gone over the exact type of problem that tripped up half the class. Not the same numbers, but the same structure, the same trick with the fractions.
That night, I graded the rest of the stack. Jordan, who sits in the back and answers questions out loud before anyone else can raise a hand, got a 61. He’d spent forty minutes on the last page, working through a problem he almost had right. Almost.
Here’s the thing I keep circling back to: the test was supposed to measure who understood the material. But it also measured whose family could pay someone to pre-teach it.
I don’t think I noticed this clearly until I became a parent myself. My own kids are grown now, but I remember the calculus of it—the way a $200 tutoring package felt like it might as well have been $2,000, the way I once spent a Saturday morning photocopying practice tests at the library because we couldn’t afford the prep book. I remember telling myself it was fine, that my kid was smart, that smart would carry him. It mostly did. But “mostly” is a word that sits with you.
The assumption we carry—that grades reflect ability—falls apart pretty quickly when you start asking basic questions. What if a kid has two working parents and a younger sibling they watch every afternoon? What if the internet at home is spotty, or shared with three other people, or nonexistent? What if they’re bright enough to understand the material but the house is loud and the only quiet place to study closes at 6 p.m.?
I once had a student, Priya, who failed the first quiz of the year. She sat in my room after school, near tears, and said, “I knew all of this. I just couldn’t do it in twenty minutes.” She was right. She could explain every concept out loud. But she’d never been taught how to take a timed test—no one had ever shown her that you skip the hard problems first and come back, or that you write down what you know even when you’re not sure. Those are skills, not intelligence. And they’re skills that tutoring centers teach, sometimes explicitly, sometimes just by repetition.
Her mother worked double shifts at a nursing home. There was no money for a tutor, and no time for Priya to stay after school most days—she had to pick up her little brother from daycare. So she learned the math, but she didn’t learn the game.
I’m not saying grades mean nothing. They mean something. They tell us a kid showed up, paid attention, did the work. But they also tell us who had help. And when we use those grades to sort kids—into honors classes, into college tracks, into the stories we tell ourselves about who is “academically talented”—we’re often sorting by income and calling it merit.
So what do we actually do about it?
I’ve started making small changes. The first one was simple: I stopped counting timed tests as the main measure of understanding. Now I give a short concept check—three questions, no time limit, done at the start of class—and I grade that separately from the unit test. The concept check tells me who actually gets it. The unit test tells me who can perform under pressure, which is a different skill.
The second change was to teach the test itself. Not in a cynical way—just a ten-minute conversation before the first big test about what to do when you’re stuck, how to budget your time, why it’s okay to skip a problem and come back. I wrote the strategies on the board and left them there all year. Some kids already knew them. Some didn’t. It cost me nothing.
The third thing I did was make practice materials available before the test—not as extra credit, just as a folder on my desk anyone could take from. No sign-out sheet, no questions asked. The kids who needed it most were often the ones who felt most awkward asking for help, so I stopped making them ask.
And I started paying attention to who stayed after school. Not just who showed up for help, but who couldn’t. There’s a difference. When I noticed that several students were consistently rushing out the door at 2:45, I asked the front office if we could open the library until 5 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It took a few emails, but it happened. One kid told me it was the only quiet place he had to do homework all week.
None of this fixes the bigger problem. The tutoring industry isn’t going anywhere, and the gap between kids whose families can buy an advantage and kids whose families can’t is wider than any one teacher can bridge. But I can at least be honest about what I’m measuring. When I hand back a test, I try to remember that the number at the top is a snapshot of a lot of things—effort, yes, but also sleep, food, quiet, time, and money.
Last week, Maya got a 78 on a quiz she didn’t prep for. She looked crushed. I sat down next to her and said, “Tell me what you know about this.” She talked for five minutes, and she knew most of it. She’d just frozen on the second page. We went over the timing strategy again, and I told her to practice with a kitchen timer at home. She nodded, still a little wobbly, and packed up her bag.
I don’t know if it’ll help. I don’t know if any of it helps enough. But I’d rather keep asking the question than pretend the answer is obvious.
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