"There will always be a conflict between education and testing"
It's pretty much inevitable, if the results of the testing have consequences, for teacher/student/school system/etc. that what is taught will often excessively focus on testing outcomes.
Unfortunately, it's hard not to do this to at least some degree at scale. Without standardized testing of some sort, there isn't a lot of feedback for how well the process is working and you more or less fall back on trust the individual teachers and schools and everything will be just fine--which isn't the case in the main.
It seems like maybe we're already back at that point. We went from trusting the teachers and schools, to adopting a test that measures household income, to hoping that we can trust the teachers and schools to educate our kids in spite of the tests.
It's pretty much inevitable, if the results of the testing have consequences, for teacher/student/school system/etc. that what is taught will often excessively focus on testing outcomes.
Unfortunately, it's hard not to do this to at least some degree at scale. Without standardized testing of some sort, there isn't a lot of feedback for how well the process is working and you more or less fall back on trust the individual teachers and schools and everything will be just fine--which isn't the case in the main.