To answer the initial question, I'm not sure how to measure the sucess of the educational system, though I can say I don't think it's very successful and I think tying funding to test scores (as is done in Florida) is absolutely horrible and whoever thought of that policy should be placed in a room and forced to take the FCAT over and over until they ace the stupid thing. What moron thought that it would be a good idea to actually give a school that is doing poorly less money and support?
It's interesting to me the number of people here who have mentioned being bad test takers themselves or having children who are bad test takers. The truth of the matter is, you're not bad test takers, you were just either not trained to take tests or the tests themselves are bad (in that they have unrealistic timing structures). Or you are so completely stressed out by the pressure being placed on you and your test results that there is no way you're going to be able to concentrate.
Just a bit of background so that people know where I'm coming from. I actually work part-time for a test prep company so I teach test prep classes (like to prepare people to take the SAT, the GRE, GMAT, or LSAT). So I deal with people who are paying rather large amounts of money to ensure that they do well on these tests. And after 5 years of doing this, I can tell you that a huge part of test taking has nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with your confidence and stress levels. And the amount of stress that is placed on students today around test time, whether it is the FCATs (or whatever state test you have) or the SATs, is horrendous. It is not an accurate measure of knowledge and skill when you tell teachers that their funding will be based on test scores and when the school basically spends the entire year freaking out the students about standardized tests.
I remember when I was younger (I'm 30 now), we had the ESTs and SATs (not the college one) in elementary school and no one thought about it. You just showed up one day and suddenly instead of having recess and grammar or whatever, we had to take a test. No big deal.
Now you have elementary schoolers spending all year prepping for a test and actually developing stress disorders (lack of sleeping, digestive disorders, even ulcers and migraines) as a result.
And in terms of the SAT for college admissions, you have more and more of the test really being about whether you know how to operate a $100 graphing calculator. Not a measure of your potential success in college.
For college and grad admissions, standardized (as in all students taking basically the same test -- not as in the test somehow being tailored to all students) is important because it's the only way colleges can easily compare people who likely came from very different backgrounds. But they should not be used as the only tool, or even the most important.
Unfortunately I do think we need some sort of test each year but really it should be a minimum standards test. I tutored a student in 3rd grade once and he had no clue how to read. At all. Couldn't sound out basic words. How he kept being promoted is beyond me. So I think there do need to be minimum standards for moving onward but I don't think that a high fail rate in a school necessarily is a measure of that school's quaility, if that makes any sense.
I really should actually get back to work and earn my paycheck.
Dawn