It’s hard to credit their anecdotal opinions over hard data. There is also quite a bit of tension between what students need, and what teachers want.

California is a particularly egregious example. It has some of the highest teacher pay in the country while having some of the lowest per-student spending in the country. That math balances on the backs of students. So teachers are happy with pay, and old homeowners are happy with their property taxes, and the students get the short end of the stick. It’s California in a microcosm.

I can second it, having gone through the Texas public education system. The standardized testing regime in Texas is completely counterproductive, and my teachers all hated it. Texas' silly education funding system that tied funding to (among other things) student attendance caused the schools to overtly encourage sick kids to show up and spread disease. The attempt by the Bush administration attempt to deploy Texas standards nationwide in the form of No Child Left Behind was a miserable failure. The legislature is constantly playing games with the schools (e.g. putting ambiguous language in the teaching standards to appease creationists [1]).

Texas has decent K-12 education in spite of everything the government does, not because of it.

[1]: https://www.statesman.com/NEWS/20170202/Texas-education-boar...

For anyone reading this site, the standardized testing regime in Texas is going to be a bureaucratic formality for the teachers and an afterthought for the students, where kids spend 2-4 days per year wasting time taking an easy test about stuff they already know, then dozing off for the rest of the time.

The sad reality is that Texas-style standardized tests measure basic material that students anywhere should be expected to know (take a look at the tests if you're not sure: this is not even the SAT we're dealing with). The primary purpose of them is to identify and remediate the many dysfunctional schools. If a school can't teach their kids this material and have 50% of them pass the test, they have a serious problem.