What Test Scores Really Measure: Ability or the Ability to Afford an Education?
I was proctoring the reading section on a Tuesday morning in October when Emily raised her hand. The room was quiet, the buzz of fluorescent lights the only background noise. We had told the third graders not to ask questions once the booklets were open. Emily knew the rules. She stared at her paper for a long two minutes before holding her hand up half-heartedly.
When I reached her desk, she pointed to a word in the third paragraph. “I don’t know what this is,” she whispered.
It was a passage about a family checking into a hotel and heading upstairs with ski gear. The word she had circled was “luggage cart.” She’d never seen one. Emily looked up at me with a face that asked if I could just tell her. I couldn’t. Test instructions are strict, so I told her to try her best and moved on.
For the next twenty minutes, she stared at the passage. When the timer went off, her answer sheet had more blank bubbles than filled ones.
Later that week, our grade-level team sat around a table looking at the scored results. The spreadsheet ranked all our students from high to low, and the same names kept coming up at the top—kids whose parents had enrolled them in test prep since first grade, kids who went to museums on weekends, kids who had traveled and seen the things test writers seem to think are universal. At the bottom were kids like Emily.
Her score said 31st percentile in reading. Her daily work in my classroom said something completely different. Emily wrote paragraphs that made the class laugh out loud. She was the first to understand why a character in a novel acted the way she did. She could explain the meaning of a story better than I could. None of that appeared in her file.
I started paying closer attention to what the test booklets actually contained. So many of the prompts assumed a particular kind of childhood. The vocabulary was full of words you encounter while standing in an art museum or a national park or an airport. The reading passages described weekend mornings where parents had two days off. The writing section asked kids to describe a time they “visited” somewhere special. For many students in our school, visiting somewhere special meant their cousin’s apartment a few blocks away.
Then there was Marcus. He’s the kid who builds complex pulley systems out of rope and plastic bottles at recess, the one who can solve a construction problem faster than most adults. On a reading test, he shut down. He could decode the words, but he skipped any question where the answer choices felt unfamiliar. His test score said he was performing far below grade level. In real life, he was the most capable problem-solver I taught that year.
A colleague once summed it up better than I could. “We like to say school measures ability,” she said, “but really it measures the training kids got before we ever met them.”
That comment changed how I hear the phrase “below grade level.” What we usually mean is: this child didn’t know the vocabulary that other children learned over dinner with parents who had time to talk. This child didn’t recognize the testing format because no one had paid for test prep. This child hadn’t been exposed to the background knowledge the test assumed everyone would have.
When Emily’s mother came for parent-teacher conferences, I had to show her the same score report. “She’s a wonderful writer,” I said carefully. “Her classroom work is excellent.” Emily’s mother nodded, studying the numbers. She worked two jobs, and she told me this as a way of explaining, not apologizing. While one of Emily’s classmates had spent the previous spring learning “vacation vocabulary” at a tutoring center, Emily had been at her grandmother’s apartment, reading library books and watching her little brothers.
The system told Emily’s mother that her daughter was failing. But failing at what? Not at reading. She read beautifully. She was failing at the hidden requirement to have encountered specific experiences and words before the test asked about them.
I brought this up with our instructional coach, and her suggestion was direct: “Pre-teach the context. Don’t just hand kids a practice test and expect them to understand the passage. If they’ve never been to a hotel, show them pictures and talk about what happens there. If they don’t know what a hiking trail is, teach it before the assessment.”
That advice felt so simple that I was embarrassed I hadn’t thought of it earlier. So we started doing background knowledge previews before practice tests. One morning, I pulled up photos of an airport check-in counter on the projector. We talked about why someone would need a luggage cart and what it looks like. The kids who had flown before became the experts, and the kids who hadn’t listened carefully. It took eight minutes.
We made a point not to preview the test questions, just the settings and situations that appeared in the passages. Kids from families with more resources already knew what a hotel checkout counter looked like. Other kids didn’t. There was nothing wrong with their reading ability; they just lacked the pictures in their heads.
The gap never fully disappears. Testing is a skill too, and children who haven’t encountered multiple-choice exams walk in with a disadvantage no amount of classroom previews can erase. But I stopped reading score reports the way I used to. Instead of asking how high a child scored, I started asking what the score was actually measuring. Was it reading comprehension, or was it familiarity with the world the test writers happened to live in?
Sometimes the answer was obvious. A question about checking into a hotel wasn’t testing comprehension at all. It was testing whether a child had ever stood in a lobby.
Now, when testing season comes around, I do things differently. I cover basic test formats so kids aren’t fumbling with answer sheets. I preview background settings from the passages. When scores arrive, I look carefully at which specific skills children missed. A low score in “inferencing” often turns out to be a gap in knowledge about a topic, not a lack of reading ability.
None of this solves the larger problem. A teacher front-loading context is not the same as a child having access to a tutor, a vacation, or a home where homework gets supervised. Emily’s scores this year were still lower than those of kids whose parents paid for prep. The report still doesn’t have a column for how much a child has been given, and no column for what a child knows that tests don’t ask about.
That seems like something worth remembering the next time we call a student “below grade level.” The level we’re measuring is partly made of resources and opportunities. I haven’t figured out how to measure a child’s ability separately from all that—but I know the test I proctored that October morning didn’t do it.
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