Annual tests end up directly costing students a month of education time, I think you need to prove benefit and not the other way around. As to their value, collages still trust SAT's and GPA more than any of the state tests in large part because they are uniformly terrible. If you really want to test teachers then randomly assign 1-2 tests to each student, it's just as statistically valid and takes ~1/3th the time.
Well, ultimately the point I'm making is that we can't prove anything about anything without standardized tests. Until we have a measurement procedure, all we are doing is groping around in the dark without any way of knowing if we are helping or harming things.
It's similarly difficult to prove that clinical trials are beneficial in medicine. You might try to compare medicine developed with clinical trials to medicine developed without it, but how would you actually make such a comparison? Not with a clinical trial, obviously...
There are plenty of useful pieces of information that have nothing to do with standardized tests. Attendance, Graduation Rates, teen pregnancy, collage admittance, GPA etc. It's true that you could gain useful information from great standardized tests administered well. Unfortunately, we don't actually have any of them that are worth a damn. Each state has it's own tests which are developed alongside the curriculum. So, is Virginia doing better than Maryland, sorry the test's can't actually tell you that. Are graduates in 2010 better prepared than ones from 2000, sorry they can't tell you that.
The idea of tests sounds good, but the implementation is so bad they are effectively worthless. Again, you can argue that great tests could mean something but we don't have them we just have crap. So, if you want to defend tests you need to defend that crap because that's the reality.
Attendance, graduation rates and teen pregnancy are meaningless. They are measures of hours of butt-seat contact, low graduation standards and horniness, respectively.
GPA is closer to a useful metric. GPA and college admittance are basically the same thing as standardized tests. Except that unlike standardized tests, you can't compare any set of grades to any other set of grades. How does that help?
Incidentally, do you realize your biggest criticism of standardized tests is that they are not standardized enough? I.e., there is too much geographic and spatial variation in them?
Consider this, when it comes to breaking the cycle of poverty a teen is better of being being one grade level behind in reading and avoid pregnancy than reading at grade level and becoming pregnant. Sex education is something that most schools teach and they have various levels of success.
You can also track where a school systems switch to abstinence only education and the rate increases. Now granted it's not supposed to be the most useful thing teenagers get from public schools, but it is a vary important part of their job and we have fairly good data on it as well.
