Is Standardized Testing Still Measuring What We Think It Measures? A Teacher’s On-the-Ground Perspective
Last Tuesday, I stood at the front of my fourth-grade classroom during state standardized testing, listening to the hum of the fluorescent lights and the faint scratch of pencil on bubble sheet. We had extra goldfish crackers on the back table for anyone who got hungry, and I’d reminded the kids three times to take their time. Halfway through the reading section, Javi raised his hand, his hand half-lifted like he wasn’t sure if he was allowed to speak. I walked over quietly, and he whispered that he didn’t know what a corn tassel was. The reading passage was about a family growing corn on a farm, and the question he was stuck on depended on knowing which part of the plant that was. Could he borrow my phone to look it up, he asked. I shook my head. Testing rules say no outside resources, no extra help, no extra context. He nodded, slouched back in his chair, and twisted the braided yarn bracelet he made at after-school art club until the end of the period.
After school, we walked out to the parent pick-up line together, and I asked him about it. He said he got the question wrong. “I get how the story worked, it was about a kid helping his grandpa,” he said. “I just never saw a corn thing before. I live in an apartment. We grow tomatoes on the fire escape.” That’s when the question I’ve been turning over for a few years clicked into place again: Is this test actually measuring what we think it measures?
A month earlier, I’d sat with Javi’s mom for parent-teacher conferences. She told me he reads two kids’ astrophysics chapter books a week, that he stays up an extra half hour every night building and rebuilding Lego robotics designs. He can explain black holes to his classmates in terms they get, and he’s the first kid other students go to when they’re stuck on a math problem during group work. None of that shows up on a bubble sheet.
It’s not just Javi. There’s Lila, who sits in the third row. She tutors two other kids in multiplication after class every week, and she aces every unit test I give. But she gets quiet and shaky when someone times her on anything. On last year’s state test, she skipped a whole 10-question section because her hands were shaking too bad to fill in the bubbles. Her score came back saying she was below basic in math. That’s not a measure of what she knows. That’s a measure of how she reacts to high-pressure, timed testing.
We’ve been told for decades that these tests give us an objective, common measure of how kids are doing, of which schools are working and which aren’t. But what they actually measure is a pretty specific set of skills that don’t line up with what we actually want kids to learn. They measure how much exposure you’ve had to the specific, often rural or upper-middle-class contexts that test writers grew up with. They measure how well you can sit still and stay calm for three hours straight. They measure whether you’ve been drilled on test-specific tricks, like how to eliminate wrong answer choices even if you don’t know the right one. None of that has much to do with critical thinking, curiosity, creativity, or the ability to solve a real problem you’ve never seen before.
That doesn’t mean we’re stuck with nothing to do, though. After that testing day with Javi, I adjusted a few things I do as a teacher, and I’ve shared these small steps with parents that are easy to try at home too.
First, when test scores come home, don’t open the conversation with the number. Instead, ask a specific question that puts the score in context: “What’s one thing you learned while you were testing that the people who made the test didn’t know?” That gives kids a chance to talk about the parts that felt unfair or confusing, instead of immediately feeling judged by a number. For me, every time I send home a score report, I add a handwritten note that lists three specific things your kid does well that the test didn’t measure. For Javi, that would be “can program a working Mars rover, explains tricky ideas to classmates clearly, reads 100 pages of nonfiction a week.” It takes five extra minutes per kid, and it gives parents context that the test never will.
For parents whose kids get a lower score than you expected, cross-check it with your daily life. Look at the books your kid chooses to read for fun, listen to them talk about the games they build or the projects they work on after school, check their everyday classwork. A test score is one single data point collected on one single high-pressure day. It’s not a full picture of what your kid knows or can do.
If your kid struggles with test anxiety, you don’t need to sign them up for expensive tutoring or extra classes to help. The morning of the test, practice two minutes of box breathing with them: inhale for four counts, hold for four, exhale for four, hold for four. And you can say this exact line to take the pressure off: “This test tells grown-ups more about what the test writers know than it tells them what you know.” It’s a small thing, but it takes a lot of the weight off for kids.
Testing is still required in our state, so we do it every year. We give out extra snacks, we let kids stretch between sections, we do our best to keep it low-stakes for them. After testing ended last week, Javi brought in the Mars rover he’d built over the weekend. It had a tiny working camera he’d programmed to take pictures of the classroom rug, and he gave a 10-minute talk to the class about how NASA uses rovers to collect data on Mars. Every kid was leaning forward, asking questions. That’s the learning that matters. That’s the critical thinking we’re supposed to care about. The score will come in a few months, and it will say what it will say. But I already have the score that matters to me.
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