This is what happens when education law is created by politicians. Politicians who get their information from lobbyists lobbying on behalf of the test makers. They believe that more testing is good, mostly because it means more money for them. In NY, the ELA is mandatory for students in grades 1-10 iirc. And these are the scores we are judging teachers on. There are many teachers in schools who are given classrooms of students who need more attention and won't perform as well on exams.

We need to seriously rethink education and how we are testing students and teachers.