This is a complicated issue, of course, but here are a few basics to guide the conversation:
1. When passing out tax dollars, the tax payers want the recipients to be accountable. That's true even if the accountability is misguided, partial, biased, creates some bad incentives, etc. Saying "we want tax dollars to educate children, but we don't want any responsibility to show you results" is just not a sustainable situation.
2. The more remote the taxpayers are, the more they will rely on cold, objective numbers to satisfy the accountability. A local community knows more about how its students are doing and whether the school is accomplishing its goals and will rely less on the numbers. Federal dollars being sent thousands of miles away will come along with standardized tests, because the taxpayers have no other way to judge whether their money is accomplishing anything.
3. Some subjects are more easily tested objectively than others, e.g. arithmetic tests are more accurate than creative writing tests.
4. People tend to optimize more for things that can be objectively measured, e.g. money over happiness; or math over painting; or horsepower over interior comforts.
5. Tests are most effective when they don't directly influence the test-takers. For instance, a street survey about who can name the 9 justices on the Supreme Court might tell us quite a bit about the knowledge of average citizens about government. But if we keep asking the same question again and again all over the place, people will learn the answer to that single question, making the results look better. But the citizen's knowledge about government hasn't really changed much.
1. When passing out tax dollars, the tax payers want the recipients to be accountable. That's true even if the accountability is misguided, partial, biased, creates some bad incentives, etc. Saying "we want tax dollars to educate children, but we don't want any responsibility to show you results" is just not a sustainable situation.
2. The more remote the taxpayers are, the more they will rely on cold, objective numbers to satisfy the accountability. A local community knows more about how its students are doing and whether the school is accomplishing its goals and will rely less on the numbers. Federal dollars being sent thousands of miles away will come along with standardized tests, because the taxpayers have no other way to judge whether their money is accomplishing anything.
3. Some subjects are more easily tested objectively than others, e.g. arithmetic tests are more accurate than creative writing tests.
4. People tend to optimize more for things that can be objectively measured, e.g. money over happiness; or math over painting; or horsepower over interior comforts.
5. Tests are most effective when they don't directly influence the test-takers. For instance, a street survey about who can name the 9 justices on the Supreme Court might tell us quite a bit about the knowledge of average citizens about government. But if we keep asking the same question again and again all over the place, people will learn the answer to that single question, making the results look better. But the citizen's knowledge about government hasn't really changed much.