I graduated in 96, before standardized testing 'took over' apparently. We had standardized tests like the ACT and SAT, they were easy and I don't think the school played much of a role in preparing kids for it. I mean, those tests were the first place in my life I'd ever seen constructions like "apple is to checkerboards as zombies are to what?" and similar. The math was largely the same I suppose, no actual mathematics and just rote computation (which is not the same thing, but I didn't know that until long after leaving school).

I graduated right before Columbine. I know that there have to be people who went to my high school who think "we barely got out alive". About a half dozen of my friends would wear pin-stripe suits on Fridays and people called them the 'pin-stripe mafia'. I wore a floor-length green military trenchcoat most of the time. At one point I wore an empty 9mm pistol shoulder holster on top of a loud Hawaiian shirt. I and my friends were basically the incarnation of every "warnings signs" list produced after Columbine. I've never been in a fight. Neither have most of my friends. Only 1 or 2 even tried anything illegal substance-wise. We produced 3 out of the 5 top students in our graduating class, including the Valedictorian. We were the freaks and weirdos, and utterly harmless. And one thing they ignored about Columbine when putting together their warning signs: Columbine was a new school. It had metal detectors on the doors. It had surveillance cameras inside and outside. It had police that periodically patroled. It required students to carry a badge and tracked their movements around the building. It was an authoritarians wet dream. And, as far as I am concerned, the people who built that school are responsible for all the deaths and trauma. If you build a prison, whoever you put in it will act like prisoners.

Control is poison. Both for the person being controlled and also for the person made to do the controlling. It is in fundamental conflict with our nature and biology, and it harms both sides. Peoples responses to it are really predictable on a large scale. They exert control over themselves (tattoos in prisons, wearing edgy shit in high school), they form alternative power structures (cliques in high school, gangs in prison), they engage in conflict interpersonally (fights), they engage in inter-group conflict (gang fights), and eventually they will go to war against the system controlling them (prison riots, revolutions, etc). This is not because the people involved are bad. It's because the people are put in a system which MAKES them bad by making them do things that, little by little, poison them. I will eat my hat if neuroscience doesn't verify this within the next 20 years, there's already a bunch of very suggestive evidence in that direction. Prison guards really shouldn't have one of the highest suicide rates of all professions you wouldn't think.

I'm sure standardized tests do not help, but the fact we know what actually WORKS and we simply aren't willing to make teachers put in the effort to DO it is stunningly sad. Everywhere that the solution is education and empowerment, whether its schooling, child abuse prevention, drug abuse prevention, wherever, nobody wants to hear it. They're comfortable with control and want it even if it is transparently ineffective.