Schools then teach test- taking skills and memorization of isolated facts rather than critical thinking, depth of content, and other frills. Cynics, mostly liberal ones, reject the do-gooder explanation as a ploy. Standardization's real goal, they argue, is not to improve public education but to destroy it. Since only public school students take the standardized tests, kids whose parents can afford private schools don't have to agonize year after year about potential failure. All those people making money off parental panic makes cynicism pretty understandable.
Conspiratorial types offer a third analysis.
According to groups like Boston's New Democracy, the primary corporate goal is not to make money off private education but to lower expectations about what education can provide. In this view, corporations are out to dim the hopes of students whose teachers might otherwise teach them they can get somewhere in life if they work hard and graduate. The corporate problem is that educated people expect to get somewhere good. This is the real new economy, but it's not what today's students envision for their middle-class futures. People tend to accept poverty when they think there's no alternative, but not when they've followed the rules and still can't get ahead.