Why standardized testing doesn’t measure what most parents think it does anymore
The coffee mug by my desk was cold, and a crumpled field trip permission slip peeked out from under my keyboard when Mia’s mom leaned forward and turned her phone toward me. “She got a 2. Below basic in math. I don’t understand. Last month she helped me budget for our kitchen remodel, calculated the 15% contractor discount, figured out how much extra tile we needed to account for cuts, and even added in a buffer for waste. How is she below basic?”
Mia’s dinosaur diorama, the one she’d stayed in during recess for a week to build, was taped to the wall behind me. I’d graded it two weeks before the state standardized test, and I’d written a note on the back about how she’d correctly calculated the scale from her drawing to the shoebox base, adjusted for the size of her T-Rex toy, and wrote three paragraphs about how prehistoric plants fit into the ecosystem. None of that made it into the score report the state had sent home two days before.
I thought about testing week, when I watched Mia work. She got to question 12, a multi-step word problem about trains leaving a station at different times, and erased so many times the paper tore along the edge of the bubble sheet. She worked slowly, checking every multiplication step twice, and when the 10-minute warning went off, she still had three questions left blank. She put her head down on her desk for the last five minutes instead of guessing, because she hates getting things wrong. That’s the thing about Mia: she’s careful. She’d rather leave something blank than put down an answer she’s not sure of. That’s not a weakness in math. That’s a strength in most real-world situations. But on a 40-minute timed test, it makes her look like she doesn’t know what she’s doing.
That’s when the question started niggling at me again, the one I think about every testing cycle: Is this actually measuring what we think it is? We tell parents these tests show how their kid stacks up, how ready they are for next grade, where they need extra help. But what they actually measure right now is a very specific set of skills that don’t line up with most of what kids actually need to know to do well in life. They measure how fast you can work through decontextualized questions. They measure how well you can guess the right answer from four options, even when your own answer makes more sense. They measure how little test anxiety you have on that particular Tuesday in May.
Last year I had Javi in class, a fifth grader who won our school science fair with his project on how rainforest erosion works. He’s dyslexic, gets extra time on all his tests, but the state ELA exam still has 12 pages of dense passages to get through. His score came back as approaching standard, which makes the state flag him as needing extra reading support. But I’ve sat with him after school while he explained climate change to his little sister, out loud, using drawings he made. He can summarize a complicated article, draw conclusions, ask good questions. The test just measured that he reads slower than the average kid, not that he doesn’t understand what he reads.
After Mia’s conference, I jotted down three concrete things I remind parents of every time we talk about test scores, and I keep a copy of the list taped inside my lesson plan book. The first is to always compare the test score to what you see your kid doing at home. If your 10 year old can read a recipe, measure ingredients, and adjust for doubling cookies, that’s real reading and math. If they can plan a birthday party budget and work out how many friends they can invite with the money you have, that’s real math that matters more than any bubble answer. I tell parents to write down three of those real skills their kid has that the test doesn’t capture, and tape that note next to the score report when they hang it on the fridge. That way, when they’re looking at it, they don’t forget the full picture.
The second is to push back if the test is the only data point being used for decisions. If the school suggests placing your kid in intervention or an advanced class based only on the test score, ask to see recent classroom work, project grades, and teacher notes. After Mia’s conference, we did a quick 10-minute one-on-one check of her math skills, and she got every question right when she wasn’t rushed. She just gets accommodations for extra time on class tests now, no intervention needed.
The third is for teachers, too: stop leading with the test score in conferences. I start every conference now by talking about what the kid has gotten better at this year, what they love doing, what they create. I bring a sample of their project work, not just a printout of test scores. The test score comes up last, if at all.
We still have to give these tests every year, it’s a state mandate, so there’s no getting around them for now. They can be useful sometimes, to spot gaps we missed as teachers, for kids who are struggling and we haven’t figured out why yet. But they’re not a report card on your kid’s intelligence, or how successful they’ll be later on.
Last week, Mia’s mom texted me a photo of her fridge: the state score sheet is up there, right next to the note I wrote about Mia’s budget work and her diorama. Mia still gets nervous before big tests, we’re still working on that, and we still don’t have a perfect way to measure every good thing a kid can do. That’s okay, I think. We just have to remember the test is one picture, not the whole album.
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