- As I said above, you would need to cite which test question are game-able, and which encourage this narrow teaching, which critics never do.
- If the problem is that teachers try to satisfy this goal by trying to game the tests, then the problem is with this way of teaching, not the tests per se.
It's not the tests per se, but it's what is put on the line. Raises, funding, evaluations, keeping your job - these are all disincentives to well-rounded education. Please don't make me quote the plethora of studies that show how important arts, literature, and the sciences are to primary education. Completely stopping studying these things for half the school year is bad.
So it doesn't matter if the tests are filled with good-to-know knowledge - they're positioned to dis-incentivize and devalue anything that isn't math, language arts, and a narrow reading of how to structure an essay.
[0] http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2013/04/11/why-excess...
You raise an objection to raises and funding being tied to test outcomes. Why would this be bad? Sure, if the tests are testing the wrong things, then we should fix the tests. But, it's not impossible to measure educational outcomes. Why should teachers continued employment, and pay, not reflect how well they are measured to be doing, at the thing they are paid to do?
Sure, if you're an incompetent teacher. But then maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't be teaching at all.
1. The test actually covers what's important
2. The teacher has the time, resources and support needed to fully convey the material to every student
3. The teacher and the school are receiving students who are realistically capable of reaching the expected level
4. The test results will be interpreted in good faith and used only to help students and teachers perform better
In the U.S. public education system, years of simplistic fixes have largely ensured that none of those are true. Instead there are vicious feedback loops: unprepared students will do worse on tests, which is held against the teachers and school no matter how hard they were trying, which leads the most motivated parents to take their kids elsewhere and the best teachers to leave teaching or find another school or district where their efforts are appreciated. After a few iterations, the district may close the “failing” school and make life even harder for kids who now have the same problems plus a more of their day commuting to a school where they'll probably bear the stigma of having come from a bad school/neighborhood.
But the teacher that does this will have students with higher scores, so by all metrics they are not the incompetent ones.
Like in software engineering, metrics lose meaning once they are used to justify rewards and punishments.
Teach the test, get better scores... Better teacher? Not likely.
Now, I'm a good test taker generally, and it has always helped me in life, and I will ensure my children know the rules of the game. But from the perspective of the country or planet, that's not time and effort well spent, it's a zero-sum arms-race that could have been better spent.
There's more to this, e.g. the fact that the tests are really testing the teachers (again very imperfectly), that some people want to privatize education and so on, but "teaching to the test" is a well known anti-pattern for good reasons, even though the individual incentives push us in that direction.