This article argues that reading levels, a seemingly neutral aspect of literacy instruction of neoliberal schooling, initiate students into the symbolic templates of capitalism. I explore young children's effects, relations, and interpretation of the field of meanings surrounding reading levels and grades in a kindergarten classroom in the U.S. I demonstrate how ranking had profound yet subtle effects on children's being and becoming by imposing development's normative temporality in the social relations of learning, and imbuing the emotions of learning with its logic. While evaluation inculcates individualised subjectivities that are crucial to the reproduction of hierarchical relations, this process is imperfect and a site of struggle. I demonstrate how evaluation's subjugating power contended with children' already existing convivial ways of being and relating. I conclude that educators must reimagine learning with and through children's perspectives so that liberatory possibilities of schooling can flourish.