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The thing is, what do you gain by knowing that school X scores 13% lower on standardized tests than school Y? That school X is worse than school Y? How does that help you provide a better educational experience for the students?

My mom's been a teacher for ~40 years, and one thing to realize about standardized tests it that they don't provide any new information to the teachers---the teachers already know which students are struggling and which students aren't. In fact, standardized testing reduces teachers' ability to respond to variation in student ability, because all students need to be prepped for the same test. Preparing lesson plans is one of the most time-consuming aspects of being a teacher, and standardized tests make that task more difficult by adding more requirements. IMO, it would be better to focus on ways to reduce teachers' administrative burdens---perhaps by making it easier to collaborate and share lesson plans with other teachers[1].

[1] And I mean genuinely make it easier to collaborate, not forcing teachers to spend 90 minutes a day trying to enter their plans into the latest and greatest ed-tech website. If you want the information standardized, hire someone specifically to transcribe paper plans into whatever system the school administrators pick.

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Now I understand that not all kids have the same abilities or backgrounds, and both make a big difference in how far those kids can go. That needs to be managed, but it needs to be managed in the standardized process.

Scaled-up voucher programs like those previously advocated by Secretary DeVos show the worst effects. There have recently been four statewide voucher programs: Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio. The Florida study is inconclusive, and the others show large negative effects. In some respects, the Louisiana results are more convincing because the results have been corroborated by two different sets of researchers and students were assigned to vouchers by lottery—the most rigorous way to evaluate vouchers. In terms of providing convincing results, the Indiana and Ohio programs, are somewhere in between, but these show negative results as well. Voucher supporters argue that the results have been worse in the recent statewide programs because they have been “heavily regulated,” by which they mean the requirements that students be tested, that these results be made publicly available, and that schools must let in any student who is eligible for the voucher. The fact that this fairly minimal oversight is considered controversial or heavy-handed, however, only reinforces that private schools are designed to be exclusive and have little interest in external accountability.