However, the test that a teacher would administer in conjunction with term papers, class participation, and similar evaluations to determine in-class marks has no bearing on the state-mandated proficiency tests.
The state tests require that all the children of the same age group know exactly the identical material to the same level of competence. So, if a school district has found that they got better overall results by spending an extra three months on fractions before moving on to long division, but the state has mandated fourth grade tests to be administered in January including a specific level of proficiency in long division, that school district is forced to rework their curriculum (using a method that they already found less than optimal) in order to meet state standards. (And they will, of course, be penalized both in millage levies and state matching funds for failing to do as well as other districts–even though their kids were probably doing better before the requirement to teach to the test.)
This is not a hypothetical. My kids are in a district that routinely scores near the top in Ohio. I have had two of my kids’ teachers tell me of specific changes they have had to make to their curriculum because the kids were not meeting the arbitrary guidelines set by the Ohio school board–even though the kids in earlier classes with the unmodified curriculum had done better on the upper grade tests.
There is also a fairly serious issue with the content of the standardized tests. They are generally written with the same sort of “offend no one” answers that drive the publicaion of the dreadful textbooks that we encounter, so any teaching curriculum that goes beyond the lowest level pablum penalizes the students that will not choose the “correct” answers on the satandardized tests. (This affects arts more than sciences, but it still has an effect on education.)