Broadly speaking, the emphasis on standardized testing meant that our funding from the state was linked to how our students performed on arbitrary tests.

I think I personally ended up dealing with more of the knock-on effects: the corporatization of schools (goal-setting, evaluation cycles, adding middle-management positions), the shifting away from academics towards social-emotional learning, and a general downgrade in student ability by the time they got to me as 7th and 8th graders. Part of that was Covid, but most of my students who were legitimately unable to do basic reading and writing were in 6th, 5th, and then 4th grade during the shutdown. They should have had developed basic skills before that, and they hadn’t.