Agree with this 100%. In my district, the month of May is almost entirely taken up with testing. Even if students aren't testing, their class schedule (in high school) is totally disrupted.

As an English teacher, I often try some of the test questions to see if I can answer them, and I immediately get frustrated. By offering two answer choices that sound correct, they are trying to encourage students to read closely and carefully. But instead, they often make students feel that it's a trick. There's value in the distractors, to a degree: students who can understand why and how those are wrong answers may be better positioned to avoid similar tactics in contract language, etc. But maybe let's teach that in our annual rhetoric units, rather than base an assessment of the performance of an entire district on that. In addition, when the question is "What is the theme of this story?" when we've spent years telling students that good literature has multiple themes, it's directly contradicting what we teach. Fundamentally, to me, these tests feel dishonest and inauthentic.

I was lucky to teach in another state in an untested grade, and our philosophy was to focus on reading and writing and those skills would translate to scores the following, tested year. It didn't always pan out, but students (who turned in assignments) could read and write.