The standardized tests should be a Godsend argument for the educational establishment, because it gives the perfect opportunity for objective statistical analysis of teacher effectiveness.
Except that in practice you get what resulted in a school principal in a nearby city fired a few years ago. She was a career "educator," who was made principal of a troubled school in a low-income section of a low-income city. Miraculously, her school's scores on the standardized tests began to improve. The next year they improved again, and the year after they repeated. She garnered all sorts of praise and, IIRC, won an award of some kind.
And then an audit proved that her staff had cooked the books on the test scoring, and there actually hadn't been any improvement at all. She was fired, and the school went back to being the sewer it always had been.
I've always wondered how long she thought she could get away with the scam. If the test scores are better and better every year, but the kids still can't read, write, or add 2 plus 2 and get 4 when they move up to the next level ... sooner or later somebody's going to notice.