I've been biting my tongue all day on this, and now, because someone who has obviously never taught a day in their life is trying to make very broad generalizations about education in this country without, I might add, any type of statistics to back up their claims, I will say this: No standardized test (in their current forms) can test critical thinking skills, and this is an area where American students are seriously lacking:
Top News - Report: Students struggle with information literacy
CriticalThinking.org - Teaching Critical Thinking Skills to Fourth Grade Students Identified as Gifted and Talented
When a test comes around that determines a student's worth based on the whole year, and based on real world skills rather than memorization of basic facts, then I will stop complaining, but not until then.
And let me just throw in here, my first post in this thread about who was to blame for American children being tested to death is spot on. No Child Left Behind took the "one test determines all" policies of a Bush-run Texas and made them national education policy. The Secretary of Education for the United States has less of an education herself than many teachers do, and has never been an educator herself. It's politicians deciding what works best in the classroom, and that is a joke.