Tests at a primary (elementary) school level are a waste of the teacher's and the students' time. This is not an argument for no govt. provision of education however. The biggest thing that I hear from teachers in NZ is that the Ministry of Ed is doing its best, through a variety of stupid policies regarding untested National Standards for primary school kids, to demote teachers from being education professionals to mere technicians. Teachers have survived for years educating a lot of people with freedom to adapt their delivery of education how they see fit. Now, however, under pressure from all sides to be "accountable" (not real accountability, but performance destroying, lip-service style accountability) teachers are being destroyed as independent professionals as the bureaucracy crushes and bows to political will.
The biggest problem with this political will is that applying pressure to the teachers is politically easy. They get all this holiday, they just play with kids all day "how easy is their job??? zomg" /sarcasm. The real problems with most bad kids start at home and are best addressed with some sort of intervention from the very beginning of the kids life from social workers monitoring the family home and environment and various other early stage policies designed to create and mentor the parents into raising a good child, not a drain on society. But supposedly, policies like this ,which are normally far more effective than simple standardised testing, are "socialism" and therefore bad.
I literally couldn't agree with you more, however my mom who has been a teacher for 30+ years, and is a great one by the way, has admitted many times that once a bad teacher gets tenure it's almost impossible to get rid of them unless they do something truly heinous. That to me is a shame because really it's just harming the kids. I was lucky to have for the most part good teachers growing up and I know that it makes all the difference in the world. My 3rd/4th grade teachers were amaazing compared to my 6th grade teacher. Even looking back I can remember science demos those teachers put on to get us excited to learn, whereas my 6th grade teacher was basically lazy and did the bare minimum.
Tests are a huge waste of time and effort, but they also hijack the curriculum also which is even worse!
The biggest problem with this political will is that applying pressure to the teachers is politically easy. They get all this holiday, they just play with kids all day "how easy is their job??? zomg" /sarcasm. The real problems with most bad kids start at home and are best addressed with some sort of intervention from the very beginning of the kids life from social workers monitoring the family home and environment and various other early stage policies designed to create and mentor the parents into raising a good child, not a drain on society. But supposedly, policies like this ,which are normally far more effective than simple standardised testing, are "socialism" and therefore bad.