Noam Chomsky on Standardized Testing and the Creation of the Economic Man.

When Chomsky speaks, we, teachers and parents, must listen carefully.

… the recent years there is a strong tendency to require assessment of children and teachers. So they have to teach the test and the test determines what happens to the child and what happens to the teacher. That’s guaranteed to destroy any meaningful educational process. It means that the teacher cannot be creative, imaginative, pay attention to individual student needs, the student can’t pursue things the student might be interested in, because you got to memorise something for this test tomorrow and the teacher’s future depends on it as well as the student’s. These are all ways… well there are people that sit at their offices, the bureaucrats and design this, like you say they are not evil people, but they are working within a system of ideology and doctrines which turns what they are doing in to something extremely harmful.

You don’t have to access people all the time. … the assessment itself is something completely artificial. It is not ranking teachers in accordance to their ability to help, develop children who’ll reach their potential, explore their creative interest. … so you’ re giving some kind of rank but it’s a rank that’s mostly meaningless and the very ranking itself is harmful. It is turning us into individuals who devote their lives in achieving a rank, not in doing things that are valuable and important. It is highly destructive … this is lower… elementary education, so you are training kids this way and, it’s very harmful. I can see it with my own children.  When my own kids were in elementary school… by the time they were in 3^rd grade they were dividing their friends into dumb and smart. … it is extremely harmful and has nothing to do with education.

source:
http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/01/187968/calls-action-noam-chomsky-standardized-testing