Is Standardized Testing Actually Measuring What We Think It Measures? A Teacher’s Perspective
Last Tuesday, 10 minutes into our first practice state test session, I saw Maya’s hand go up. She’s in my third-grade class, and that morning she’d shown off the sparkly unicorn eraser her grandma had sent her for testing week, so I expected she’d dropped a pencil or needed a new bubble sheet. When I got to her desk, she pushed the paper toward me, her cheek pink, and whispered that she couldn’t answer number 12.
The reading passage was about a 10-year-old who planted a vegetable garden with his grandpa. Number 12 asked for the main idea of the second paragraph, which talked about waiting three weeks for seeds to sprout and watering every other day even when it felt like nothing was growing. Option A said “The boy learned how to plant seeds correctly.” Option C said “Gardening requires a lot of patience.” Both were true. The paragraph mentioned both. Maya had scribbled in the margin: My grandma has a tomato garden just like this. I pick the green ones when she’s not looking. She hadn’t bubbled anything. I told her to pick the one that felt most right to her and move on, but she worried at that question for the rest of the 45-minute block.
When I graded the practice tests later, Maya got a 2, our state’s “below basic” mark. That’s the same score that would flag her for extra help and keep her out of the advanced reading block next year, if we go only by test results. I pulled out her portfolio from my cabinet after school that day. Last month, she led her group’s project on native mason bees. She built a bee hotel out of old bamboo sticks and cardboard, interviewed our county extension agent over the phone, wrote three pages about how bees help our school garden grow, and drew detailed diagrams of the different bee life stages. She even convinced the PTA to buy 20 native wildflower plants for the garden. That work showed far stronger reading comprehension, writing, and critical thinking than any 12-question multiple-choice section could.
Last week I met with Maya’s mom, who told me she’d been cutting Maya’s after-school art class short two days a week to do main idea practice worksheets. She’d seen the practice score and was worried Maya would “fall behind” if she didn’t drill. I could hear how stressed she was, because all our school communications talk about how important these scores are for future success. That conversation got me thinking again about the question we all tiptoe around this time of year: what are these tests actually measuring, anyway?
We tell parents they measure how well a kid is mastering grade-level skills, but that’s not the whole truth. What they really measure first is how well a kid can navigate the unwritten rules of multiple-choice testing: that you have to pick the “best” answer even when two are correct, that you can’t write your own thoughts in the margin, that you have to sit still for four hours straight even if your brain works better when you can get up and move. They also measure a lot of things that have nothing to do with learning: whether you had a stable breakfast that morning, whether your family moved last month, whether you get test anxiety the way a lot of bright kids do. Last year, Javi, one of my fourth graders, scored below basic in math. He’s the kid who runs his own lawn mowing business for the neighbors in his apartment complex, calculates 10% discounts for the retired ladies on his block, keeps a running log of his expenses to save for a new dirt bike. He does more complex, real-world math every month than any standardized test will ever ask him to do. His score said he wasn’t proficient, but that was never true.
That doesn’t mean we have to throw out all testing, or that there’s no point in prepping a little. What I’ve found works, both as a teacher and for the parents I work with, is small, low-stakes prep instead of cramming. I do one 15-minute practice bubble session a week for a month before testing, just to show kids how to fill in the bubbles correctly and what the questions feel like. That’s enough. I don’t cancel recess to do extra test prep, I don’t skip our weekly read aloud to drill main idea questions. For parents, instead of cutting out extracurriculars your kid loves to add an hour of worksheets a night, try that same 10-minute once-a-week practice just to get them used to the format. Keep a little folder of your kid’s everyday work: the story they wrote for fun, the photo of the bird feeder they built, the list they made to budget for a new toy. If your school ever tries to place your kid in a lower level class or flag them as behind based only on a test score, you have that folder to show them what your kid can actually do. Most schools will listen, if you have concrete examples of their learning outside of a test bubble.
We still have to give these tests every year, it’s a state requirement, and that’s not changing any time soon. I still remind kids to get a good night’s sleep and bring a snack they like. I still have that little note Maya wrote in the margin of her practice test taped to the edge of my desk, right next to my lesson plan book. It reminds me every day that the most important things kids learn—how to ask questions, how to connect what they read to their own life, how to solve problems that don’t have one right answer—don’t show up on a bubble sheet. We don’t have all the answers, and the test isn’t going anywhere, but we get to decide what weight we give it. That’s something parents and teachers can hold onto, even when testing week feels overwhelming.
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