When I was in school, we took a test in first grade that lasted less than a day, and was probably a screen for learning disabilities. I screwed it up, and my mom had to persuade the school that I didn't need to be in special ed. The teachers had many ways to evaluate student progress: Simply watching students, giving assignments such as worksheets, problems, quizzes, tests, and more elaborate homework in high school. My parents got to see my report card.
So, I have no problem with testing, per se.
Today, I've got two kids in school, and they are inundated with tests. A testing season (preparation followed by one or more test days) can last weeks. Little is learned during that time. Bright kids have already mastered the material on the tests, and are bored out of their skulls. Dull kids are getting drilled in a remarkably narrow range of topics. One of my kids received, as homework, a worksheet on "test taking skills" to review with her parents, consisting of ways to improve her odds slightly on questions that she couldn't answer.
The tests cover math and reading, though a new regime of even more tests may change that, by imposing narrow set of easily memorized factoids on the science curriculum. An effect is to give short shrift to other subjects such as music and just playing outside.
The sheer amount of testing, and the stakes involved, distort what is taught at school. And I don't think it gives parents any actionable information that they couldn't have learned by talking to the teacher or looking at a report card. If kids are in a dysfunctional school, they probably can't escape from it. The state (WI) has a charter school system in one region, but the charter schools perform no better than the public schools, and discriminate against kids with disabilities. Oddly enough, in its first attempt to expand the charter school system to the entire state, the legislature wrote a bill that would have exempted charter schools from the same "accountability" imposed on public schools.
If you work at a large corporation, as I do, think about the quantitative goals that you are given for your job. At one place where I worked, purchasing bought a bunch of stuff because they were measured on getting price breaks from suppliers, and manufacturing threw it away because they were measured on inventory. High stakes metric driven management of complex organizations creates a web of perverse incentives.
/rant