Did you read what he said? The bad teachers just "teach the test", the good teachers are far better off without state provided standards and equal outcome mandates rendering the entire exercise pointless.
No, he said the lazy teachers "teach the test", i.e. strive to make sure their students meet minimum standards. A system which makes sure even lazy workers perform adequately is a good system.
...the good teachers are far better off without state provided standards...
No, he said the good teachers are just as well off - they modify the standard lesson plans and are only penalized if their students do poorly.
I'm not sure if you are being deliberately obtuse. The lazy workers are not performing adequately under the system, they are gaming it by focusing only on monitored metrics.
This has real consequences for good teachers, who have to justify what they are trying to teach to a principal who only cares that school funding will be cut unless standardized test scores improve.
As long as the monitored metrics are appropriate measures of what the school is trying to teach, there is nothing wrong with optimizing them. If the metrics are insufficient, then the problem is the metrics, not the attempt to maximize them.
Since neither you nor imroot actually criticized the metrics, I see no reason to believe they do a bad job of measuring performance.
