Is Standardized Testing Actually Measuring What We Think It Measures Anymore? A Teacher’s Take
Last month, on the second day of our state’s annual standardized testing, I walked between rows of 4th grade desks watching my students bend over their answer sheets. The AC hummed too loud in the portable classroom, someone’s stomach gurgled halfway through the 90-minute block, and the only sound most of the time was the scratch of No. 2 pencils on bubble sheets. When I got to Mia’s desk, her page was still blank. She was twisting the pink unicorn eraser on her pencil so hard her knuckles were white, and when I leaned down to whisper that she could take a one-minute stretch break, she just shook her head. Twenty minutes later, she turned her test in with only three out of 30 questions answered.
A few weeks later, when scores came out, Mia landed solidly in the “below basic” range. Her parents scheduled a conference right away, both of them leaning forward across my desk with the score report printed out, asking if she needed after-school tutoring, if she was falling further behind than they’d realized. I pulled my binder of Mia’s work from this semester and set it on the desk between us: her science project on native bee populations, for which she’d interviewed a beekeeper from our town’s community garden and written a three-page proposal asking the PTA to plant clover in the unused corner of the playground. A photo of the fairy village she built at recess that first graders visit every day, where she’s made rules to keep everyone’s tiny decorations safe. A copy of the fractions lesson she walked the reading group through last month when I was pulled out for a meeting.
Her parents looked through the work and relaxed, because they already knew this was their kid. They just needed someone to say out loud that the number on that page didn’t match the kid they lived with. That’s when I started thinking again about the question everyone’s been asking for years: is this test actually measuring what we think it is?
I saw the flip side of that same disconnect with Javi, another student in my class this year. Javi scored “proficient” on the same test, right at the cutoff the state says means he’s on track for 5th grade. But Javi can’t read a 10-page chapter book about monster trucks (his favorite thing) on his own, and he struggles to write a paragraph explaining why he likes a certain game. His dad spent two months doing an hour of test prep with him every weekend, working through practice test after practice test, teaching him tricks to eliminate wrong answers even when he doesn’t understand the question. Javi’s good at that—he’s great at following rules and memorizing tricks. But that skill doesn’t translate to actually understanding what he reads, which is what we’re supposed to be measuring, right?
What do we think we’re getting out of these tests? Most parents and teachers think they’re a reliable measure of how much a kid knows, how ready they are for the next grade, or how well a school is doing its job. But what they actually measure most days is a mix of things that have nothing to do with learning: whether a kid can sit still for 90 minutes without fidgeting, whether their family could afford $200 test prep books and classes, whether they slept well the night before, whether they don’t have anxiety that makes their brain go blank when someone is timing them. Last year, one of my students scored 30 points lower than his usual range because his family’s apartment had a fire the night before testing, and they’d slept on a friend’s couch. No one mentions that every test score has a 15-point margin of error built into it anyway—enough to move a kid from “below basic” to “proficient” just by chance.
This doesn’t mean you should ignore test scores entirely, or that they have no use. They can help spot patterns I might miss—if half my class gets all the fraction questions wrong, that tells me I need to re-teach that unit in a different way next time. But for individual kids, and for individual parents, there are small concrete things you can do to keep that score in perspective.
First, if you get a score back that’s lower than you expected, don’t rush to sign up for expensive tutoring or change your kid’s class. Pull three weeks of their recent homework and classwork, and read the notes their teacher sends home. Most of the time, that’s a far clearer picture of what they know than a single test on a single day. Second, if you’re confused about the score, ask your teacher to walk you through what it does and doesn’t tell you. Most teachers know the test is flawed, and they can tell you how it matches up (or doesn’t) with what your kid does every day in class. Third, for teachers, I’ve started adding a one-page note to every conference that lists three specific things my students can do well, and one specific thing they’re working on, right next to any test score. It doesn’t take that long, and it keeps the focus on the kid instead of the number.
After Mia’s conference, her parents canceled the after-school tutoring they’d signed up for. They let her keep going to the community garden club after school, and she just helped organize a plant sale at the grocery store to raise money for that clover patch she wanted. Javi’s mom agreed to add 15 minutes of one-on-one monster truck reading with our classroom para every day, instead of more test practice, and he’s already started sounding more confident reading out loud.
We still have to give these tests every year, and there’s still a lot of pressure from the state to treat those scores like they matter more than they do. The question of what we should be measuring instead is still open, and it’s going to take a lot more change to fix the system. But last week I watched Mia teach a group of first graders how to identify different wildflowers, and explain why each one helps bees make honey. That’s the kind of problem-solving, critical thinking we say we want from kids, and no standardized test can capture that. For now, that’s enough to remember when that score report comes in the mail.
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