I.E. the tests are not at fault, but it sounds like your education system is teaching things in a wrong and inefficient manner.

First of all, let's clarify: I'm not American, and it's not my education system (which doesn't mean that I don't have first-hand experiences with the consequences).

To provide some anecdotal comparison, here in Denmark, we also regularly test students. Nobody has any problems with this, the education doesn't lack because of it. So the problem does not lie in testing, but it might lie in what you test for, and how the teachers perceive what the most efficient way of teaching is.

I think you may not be able to fully relate to how different American-style standardized testing is from the tests you are used to and what they do the education system because of how incentives are structured. Compare, for example, questions on the French Bac [1] with SAT questions [2]. Even though both supposedly test preparedness for college, there is a world of a difference between the two.

Testing is generally a crucial part of any education system; it provides feedback, incentives, and a lot of other things. There is absolutely nothing wrong with testing as such. There is a lot wrong with US-style standardized testing.

First of all, much of US standardized testing is not about evaluating students, but about evaluating schools and teachers (this is alluded to in the article). Schools may lose funding and teachers may even lose their jobs because of poor performance on standardized tests. This is why the school in the article is in such a state of panic over even just one family avoiding the tests and which is also why students could opt out in the first place (because it isn't really about the students).

As a consequence, this creates strong incentives to make sure that test results are good, no matter how that is accomplished. (In some extreme – and rare – cases, there have been teachers and schools with knowledge of tests who prepared their students accordingly beforehand.)

Because of the nature and design of standardized tests in the US, teaching deep understanding is a poor use of school resources to accomplish this goal; it's generally more efficient to fake a sufficient amount of understanding and rely on rote stuff. This, of course, creates a negative feedback loop that affects how material is being taught and – eventually – even how curricula are designed.

On top of that, the effort of dealing with standardized testing – especially as pervasive and frequent as it currently is in America – eats up a great many teaching resources.

You are of course correct that standardized tests couldn't be a problem without other parts of the education system creating negative feedback loops. For example, in the US, teachers are underpaid relative to other professionals with graduate degrees [5], and given the degree of inequality in America and the cost of a college degree, this creates a strong incentive for the best and the brightest among a generation to do something other than teaching. This in turn means that schools are trying to weed out the poor teachers, and the methods for that tend to punish the good teachers and the students as well.

(I note that European systems have plenty of problems of their own, such as the myriad of issues with badly thought out approaches to tracking [3] that many European countries have [4]. But these are independent problems.)

[1] http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/a-look-at-one-...

[2] http://sat.collegeboard.org/practice/sat-practice-questions

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_(education)

[4] It's not that tracking as such is harmful – not all students are alike, after all –, but many implementations of tracking are harmful in that they further social segregation or create incentives for good teachers to work at upper tier schools, leaving lower tier schools with poorer teachers.

[5] To be clear, US teachers are generally not poorly paid. But with a graduate degree, they can earn more – generally much more – elsewhere, which leads to a sort of brain drain out of the education system.