I believe all education should be reduced to teaching the test. Shoot. Let's just come out and acknowledge the fact, shall we? School doesn't teach you anything but how to go to school. Nothing you learn in kindergarten prepares you for anything but 1st grade, and so on and so on until you graduate. It's the life lessons you learn interacting with peers and adults during your school years that prepare you for life - and there's no standardized test for that. School just keeps kids busy while they learn enough about how to live, and how to get along, to give them a crack at being good enough at it to get through the rest of life.
So put the emphasis where it should be: we need to do a better job, teaching kids to do better at school. Which means: doing better on the tests. Then we can make the tests that much harder! Ultimately, the goal should be for the U.S. to have the hardest tests in the world, and then build an unstoppable army of schoolkids who can take them. Who can beat them.
The next step after that? We institute some sort of high-profile, prestigious global Academic Olympics to humiliate the rest of the world's kids. In fact, just as gym class has been phased out, this Academic Olympics could eventually supplant the "gym class version" of the Olympics. Excercise is important to a healthy lifestyle, but ridiculous feats of athleticism are not!
There's more I could say, but for now let's let that stand as my comprehensive stance on the topic.
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