North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

As far as I know, there aren't any subjects that are best taught through rote. (The confusion between rote learning and practicing skills is a pet peeve of mine.) Learning and testing don't need to resemble each other, not at all, not any more than a physical exam at the doctor's office needs to include a balanced meal, eight hours of sleep, and some light exercise. I think I established that pretty well in my comment: the way I was taught calculus was very different from how I was tested. I was taught calculus through lecture, demonstration, and practice, using applications to motive a new concept, covering the concept intuitively before learning the mechanics, and finally learning and practicing the relevant computational skills. My ex was the one who was taught according to the philosophy that learning should consist of mimicking the test over and over again.

Most elementary/middle and even high school tests aren't nearly as good as AP tests.... Now AP tests do (at least partially) solve for this with their free response and short answer sections, but Standards of Learning (or other state tests) may not.

In other words, standardized tests are capable of reflecting and encouraging progressive teaching ideals OR regressive fact-regurgitation models of learning. I have no doubt at all that poor tests can be written, have been used in the past, and are currently in use in some places. Tests can't help but reflect the beliefs and competence of the people who write them, but that applies to everything else in education. Nothing is immune to being screwed up by individual or institutional incompetence. If you assume competent, progressive teachers and incompetent, benighted test-writers, it's easy to conclude that tests will drag down educational standards. That isn't fair, though. There's no reason to assume that the test designers are any less enlightened and competent than the teachers manning the classrooms.

in the real world (or in college), I'm less likely to have to pick WW2 generals out of a lineup and more like to need to come up with a few paragraphs on what caused it or how it was won or something

I have to disagree with you there. That NEVER happens in the real world. In real life, you most commonly draw on historical knowledge to generate context for things you read or hear. You often have to rely on little factoids such as names and dates to generate connections between what you're reading and what you already know, because you might be hearing something from somebody who doesn't know the context themselves. (Or you might be reading something by a political pundit who is being selective with the facts.) Knowing dates is highly underrated. In a classroom, you learn that dates are the most sterile and inert form of historical knowledge. That may be true for academics or for students, but for laypeople applying a casual knowledge of history in the real world, dates come in really handy. They're the Kevin Bacon of historical connections.

>> Years, decades of seeing kids die to suicide

Oh come on. You could at least wait couple of lines before you drop "you are a child killer" bomb. This is complete bullshit. There are very unfortunate cases of child suicide. It has nothing to do with existence and merit of evaluation system whatsoever and assigning to it responsibility for dying kids is a demagogy at its purest.

>>> And then you assume it is a good proxy for teachers.

Again, I don't assume anything - I say this criteria is inevitable, since the job of the teachers is to educate the children, and well-educated child is considered teacher's success, while poorly educated one is considered a failure. Since we don't have a way to test capability of teaches by supplying them with test kids to be taught in lab conditions - we have to test the actual kids to sample their level of education. It's not a choice, it's a logical consequence of current system of assumptions. It's as much choice as for a man jumping from a building it is a choice to hit the pavement.

>>> Your older education system did a great job.

It did great job for some and terrible job for others. It does the same now, only much more expensively. That is another reason why government is so eager to introduce testing - the costs are raising massively, the results aren't improving, and in some places are actually nothing short of disastrous - with schools releasing people that are completely illiterate. Every school complains it's underfunded but more funds do not seem to produce better outcomes. The budgets have limits, so it is no wonder that whoever distributes those budgets wants to see some metrics about how things are going instead of blindly throwing money in an hoping for the best. If something gets startups killed is exactly throwing money out without any way to measure if something was achieved or not.

You are making subjective judgments. This is fine. But don't confuse your opinions on "fairness" with an objective reality.