Perhaps if the original article said that even the best students are now coming in with great test taking skills but little practical knowledge, then maybe it would be clearer.
Anyway, this is Hi from India, where we have been choking on the fruits of this system.
If you wanted to divorce understanding from proficiency, there is no better way than what you'll have implemented.
What's more terrifying is that this system mutates and evolves, and as older teachers drop out of the system you are left with a new crop who know of no other way to teach.
Finally you'll start getting guide books and coaching classes, massive money spinners,where students are trained on potential test questions relentlessly, so that they can get perfect scores.
A few years down the line some bright spark will argue that "we need to improve the system, our kids are getting through without knowing the rules of the grammar"
Cue fractional mark losses for bad grammar.
This kind of machinery is blind to its faults, and since it produces numbers and measurables, its hard to argue with.
But from experience with tests and human behavior, people always find the shortest path to getting stuff done. Be it video games, taxes or testing.
This is a sacrifice of your best for the mediocre.
The mediocrity of a lot of third world education comes from an education system fixed on memorization - Richard Feynman had a comment about Brazilian education in one of this books (though things might have gotten better there for all I know). The thought that the US is creating a third world system out-of its previous first world education system is mind-boggling.
I find this statement quite extraordinary. Moreover, despite the length of your post, I don't see where you reconcile the implication that there's nothing to worry about here. The various measures you're talking about might indeed ameliorate some problems. Most of these aren't available to individual teachers but to parents and administrators. Moreover, even these were available to individual teachers, even if the only thing stopping them was their venality (two statements I don't believe are true), even then, the teachers on average simply haven't done and the consequence is that a lot of classroom time has been devoted to mere test preparation. And so given that this program began a decade ago, there have been results.
Ill prepared college freshmen are a well known phenomenon in the United States.
Yes, you'd assume college teachers would consistently remark on this if the quality of graduating seniors were consistently declining. But you're this as if things couldn't get worse and I kind of think we should be worried about them getting worse.