It’s amazing you used standardized test stats, while I believe the test are part of the problem. When I was in school, you learned the subject, and the standardized test was a decent level. Now, all the subjects are should be called reading comprehension, because that’s how they teach. Teachers are held to teach their students how to pass the test. Extra school funds are tied to percentages based on test scores. So they pass out, and teach off of, worksheets that are mirrored off of these test. So they don’t teach science, hey teach you to answer the multiple choice questions after reading about science. Everytime my kids bring homework home i ask them if all of their work is like this, this being reading comprehension worksheets, and they say “pretty much”.
My favorite example of how broken it is is from my Senior year in high school.
The test used for funding at time was the TAAS (Texas Assessment of Academic Skills). It was insultingly easy. I aced the High School Exit Exam version of it it in 4th grade. But EVERYTHING in school was about that test.
We actually took the real test in 10th grade, so everyone had extra chances if they failed it. If you didn’t pass, you were placed in special classes that focused even MORE heavily on it so you could try again the next semester. In order to take any AP courses after 10th, you had to have already passed the test. In my English IV AP courses, every student in the class had gotten a perfect score on the exam 2 years earlier.
They still made us practice it weekly. We had block scheduling, so “weekly” was 40% of all class meetings. Why did we have to keep practicing for a test we’d already aced? Because they wanted to the teacher to practice having the students practice.
We never practiced for the SAT.
