You are saying that if you have better teachers who know how to teach, then standardized testing doesn't matter - it doesn't have to be about drills. That's es

You are saying that if you have better teachers who know how to teach, then standardized testing doesn't matter - it doesn't have to be about drills. That's essentially waving a magic wand. You are super privileging teacher training as some sort of silver bullet solution, but missing the larger system that works actively against the outcome. You are undervaluing the various pressures which get applied to education, one important one being parent desires to see their kid succeed. It doesn't matter if the kid understands or not. It doesn't matter if he can answer more important questions but isn't able to perfectly prove a theorem. No amount of teacher training can stand in the face of a single determined parent who wants their kid to ace that test. Heck a more trivial point which is still important? - teacher empowerment must come hand in hand with training, because each student is vastly different even from him or herself depending on what time of the day/month or year it is. Teachers must be able to make graded and customized judgement constantly. Tests don't allow for that. Moving the power for measurement into the hands of the test dis-empowers teachers. The test becomes/IS all that matters here, not the education. And Tests only roughly measure learning. They MOST strongly measure whether you could answer that particular test. The test is all that matters. As a result, the kind of teaching you value, becomes deprecated. Its just not economically competitive. As the original article posits. You don't need teachers to pass the test. You need drill Sergeants. Teachers who are good at that are the ones who will come to the fore, other teachers don't matter. You could love your subject and instill it in students. But that doesn't guarantee a good grade. Loving a subject, being involved in it, and testing well in it are different. Especially if you don't "think the test". This is the final pressure - loving a subject or enjoying it is irrelevant. Students care even less, they know that as long as that they get the test - its all good. "I'm getting good marks In a stupid subject like chemistry, who cares?". Do you want those people becoming your computer science engineers? The system you are setting up is concerning, and no amount of teacher training will solve it. ----- Further I think you are talking about standardized tests America had 30 or so years ago. Speaking on behalf of student body of India - we would have loved to have tests like that. At least in America you had the option of making a life if you had some gumption even if you didn't ace those tests. You were a person as opposed to a Frankenstinian mental athlete. Our tests were/are compulsory, for many people not in their first language, and they determined everything from your social standing to your marriage prospects. You started studying for your tenth standard exam 2 years before they started, you had no vacation and you had no spare time. Then 2 years later you would do it for your ISC or IIT or CAT.