"Why not test the things we value, and test them in a way that provides us with an accurate picture of what children really do, not what they can do under the m

"Why not test the things we value, and test them in a way that provides us with an accurate picture of what children really do, not what they can do under the most constrained circumstances after the most constrained test preparation?" Because the purpose of testing is to use it as a weapon to punish political opponents and brag about your own accomplishments. Also it can be used as a weapon to reduce funding, if you want to reduce funding and need to provide an acceptable theoretically 3rd party evaluated reason, ditto if you see firing people as an inherent good. Along the lines of security theater logic, the more painful and obnoxious and offensive the testing is, the better it must be and the more the school must care about kids, for a similar example see the logic behind corporal punishment in schools from decades past (we only beat the kids because we love them or somesuch nonsense). Finally if you carefully design racially biased tests or socioeconomic biased tests, then even a proud liberal can select the lilly white rich subdivision for their kids "because of the test scores" in an abstract public sense, not the highly politically incorrect race and income data. The analogy with security theater is the truly critical point from above. School testing exists to improve schools in exactly the same way TSA jackboots molesting women at airports improves security.