Is Standardized Testing Still Measuring What We Think It Measures? A Teacher’s Perspective
The fluorescent lights hummed too loud over my 4th grade classroom on the second day of state standardized testing last spring, and I watched Mia twist her ponytail so hard around her finger I thought she’d pull it out. She’d brought her favorite lemon poppy seed muffin in her dinosaur lunchbox that morning, chattering to me before class about the 14-page graphic novel she was writing about a rescue cat that solves neighborhood mysteries. Now she stared at her answer sheet, her eraser wearing a hole through the bubble next to question 17.
The reading passage was about the construction of hydroelectric dams in the Pacific Northwest. Mia couldn’t have cared less about hydroelectric dams. She has ADHD, and gets extra time on all class assignments and tests per her IEP, but state rules ban that accommodation for the standardized test. She got up to sharpen her pencil three times in 20 minutes, then handed me her test half an hour before the bell, half the questions blank. “I can’t do it,” she mumbled, her cheeks pink. “It’s boring and my head hurts.” I sent her to the water fountain to cool down, and leaned against the turning bin, staring at her name scrawled at the top of the sheet. That’s when I first really asked the question: is this test actually measuring what we think it measures anymore?
Six weeks later, the scores came back. Mia was rated “below basic” in reading comprehension. Her mom called me that night, voice tight, saying Mia had cried at dinner, repeating that she was bad at reading, that she was stupid. I pulled up Mia’s writing folder on my computer while we talked, and read a few lines of her graphic novel out loud to her mom: the part where the cat hides under the porch because he’s scared his new family won’t want him anymore, the way Mia wrote the dialogue so you could feel how nervous he was. “This is 4th grade reading?” her mom said, quiet. It’s better than most 7th grade writing I get, I told her. The test just didn’t ask her to do the thing she’s good at.
We’ve been told for so long that standardized tests measure how much a kid knows, how good a school is, how prepared a kid is for the next grade. But after 12 years in the classroom, I can tell you what they actually measure most days: how well a kid can sit still for four hours answering multiple-choice questions about topics they don’t care about, how well they manage the knot of anxiety in their stomach that day, whether they ate a filling breakfast, whether their little sibling didn’t keep them up all night with a fever, whether the kid next to them was coughing through the whole section. They measure whether a kid can pick the “right” answer out of four options, instead of explaining their own answer that makes perfect sense but doesn’t fit the test maker’s rubric.
Last year I had a 5th grader named Javi who scored “advanced” in math on the state test. A month later, we planted tomatoes in our class garden, and Javi couldn’t figure out how to measure the spacing between each plant so they’d have enough room to grow. He could solve for x on an algebra problem the test threw at him, but he couldn’t apply that same math to a project he was actually doing. The test measures a very specific type of skill, and that skill isn’t always the one that matters for real life.
That doesn’t mean scores are useless. They can flag when a kid is struggling with a specific skill that we need to address, a gap we missed. But the problem is we treat one score from one spring morning as the full picture of a kid’s ability. We use it to sort kids into reading groups, to grade schools, to decide who gets into what programs, and that’s where it breaks.
I’ve started doing three concrete things this year as a teacher, and I tell parents to try similar small steps at home too. First, when I talk to parents about test scores, I always lead with what I’ve seen in the classroom first, before I mention the number. If your kid comes home with a score that feels wrong, pull out their recent homework, the story they wrote, the Lego set they built from a 100-page instruction manual. That’s more information than any test score can give you. Second, if your kid is getting ready for testing week, skip the pre-test pep talk that says “this is really important, you need to do your best.” Instead, say something specific like, “Tonight after your test, we’re going to get your favorite ice cream and play that board game you love, no matter how the test goes.” It takes the pressure off, and it reminds them their worth isn’t tied to that one day. Third, if your kid gets a score that doesn’t match what you know they can do, ask the school to look at their classwork alongside the test, don’t just accept the label the test gives them.
Last month, Mia won our school’s annual young writer award for her rescue cat graphic novel. A hundred parents and kids cheered for her when she went up on stage to get her certificate. Her “below basic” reading score is still in her school file, it will follow her through elementary school. The state still uses these scores to rank my school, to decide how much funding we get, to measure how “good” I am as a teacher. That’s not changing any time soon.
But for me, and for Mia’s mom, we know what the real measure is. It’s not the bubble sheet, it’s not the number. It’s the 14 pages of story, the way Mia can make a whole room of people care about a fictional cat. It’s the things standardized tests will never, ever think to measure.
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