Is Standardized Testing Still Measuring What We Think It Measures? A 4th Grade Teacher Explains
Last May, I stood at the back of my 4th grade classroom proctoring our state’s annual standardized ELA test, the sharp smell of lemon keyboard sanitizer still hanging in the air. Every student’s face was lit by the blue glow of a Chromebook, the only sounds the hum of the projector fan and the scratch of erasers on scratch paper. That’s when I saw Mia, hunched over her screen, twisting the end of her braid so hard her knuckles were white.
I wandered over, bent down, and she whispered that she couldn’t answer the question. Testing rules don’t let me explain content, so I just told her to read it again slowly. The passage was about a teen who worked on her family’s wheat farm every summer, and the question asked for the primary emotion the author expressed in the third paragraph. None of the multiple-choice options felt right to her, she said later. She’d never been within 100 miles of a working farm, couldn’t picture the lazy summer evenings the author described, and couldn’t square the messy, mixed feeling the writing gave her with the four one-word options on the screen. She guessed, and moved on.
Mia is the kid who brings a new novel to class every week, who leads our after-school book club through 20-minute debates about character choices, who wrote a 12-page story about her rescue cat that had half the class crying when she read it out loud. Anyone who spends 10 minutes talking to her about books knows she’s a sharp, thoughtful reader with way better comprehension than most kids her age. When scores came back in August, Mia was labeled “below basic” in reading.
I saw the same thing play out with my own 8th grade son last year. He spends every weekend building remote-controlled robots in our garage, can calculate gear ratios and battery life in his head faster than I can type it into a calculator. He aced his algebra class all year, but lost 18 points on the end-of-year standardized test because he showed his work in a different order than the automated scoring program expected. The score said he was “approaching proficiency” in algebra. It didn’t say he can solve problems that stump me.
I’ve been teaching elementary school for 12 years, and this gap between what we think standardized tests measure and what they actually measure has gotten wider every year. We tell ourselves these tests show how much kids know, how ready they are for the next grade, how effective our schools are. But what I see every testing cycle is that they measure a very specific, narrow set of skills that don’t line up with what we actually care about kids learning. They measure how well a kid can pick the one “correct” answer the test maker decided on, even when real ideas don’t fit into four multiple-choice boxes. They measure how well a kid can sit still and focus on a screen for three hours straight, which has nothing to do with how well they can solve a problem over an afternoon, or write a story, or debate an idea. They measure how much a kid’s life experience lines up with the middle-class, suburban contexts most test questions are written from.
When Mia’s mom came in for our fall parent-teacher conference, she was panicking. She asked if she needed to hire a reading tutor, if Mia should repeat 4th grade, if she was going to struggle through middle school. I pulled out Mia’s cat story, pulled out my notes from her book club discussions, and laid them on the table next to the score report. I gave her a piece of advice I now give all parents, that I’ve learned from years of these moments: before you make any decisions based on a test score, pull out a piece of paper and write down three things your kid does regularly that show their skill in that area.
For Mia, that list was: reads an entire novel every week, leads book club discussions, writes 10+ page stories for fun. That list told us more about her reading ability than any test score could. If your kid gets a low math score but can calculate the tip at dinner and figure out how much paint you need for a bedroom, that score is wrong. If your kid gets a high score but won’t read for fun outside of school and can’t explain what they just read, that score doesn’t tell the whole story either.
Another thing I tell parents: the night before the test, skip the cram worksheets. Make their favorite dinner, let them go to bed 15 minutes early, and only mention the test to say “It’s just a bunch of practice questions. It doesn’t change how I think about how smart you are.” Test anxiety pulls down more scores than any gap in actual skill, and that small routine does more to help them do their best than a week of drilling.
For teachers, the small shift I’ve made that works is ditching test-based reading groups for 5-minute one-on-one check-ins every quarter. I ask each kid to bring a text they’ve chosen to read, have them read a paragraph out loud, then ask them what they think the author is trying to say. That 5 minutes tells me more about their comprehension than any 3-hour multiple-choice test ever has.
I still proctor these tests every spring. It’s part of the job, and right now there’s no widespread replacement that fits all the requirements states have. Mia is moving on to middle school next fall, and she still sends me new chapters of her cat story when she finishes them. The test score is still in her file, but it never changed anything we already knew about how smart, thoughtful, and creative she is. There are still a lot of things we don’t know how to measure fairly in education. But the first step is to stop pretending that one test on one morning can tell us everything we need to know about a kid.
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