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I agree that there's too much emphasis on standardized tests. These tests have biases and are generally unimportant considering that they don't measure what they claim to be measuring.
Not to mention there will always be children left behind if we don't address inequalities in education. We try to track kids into "smart" and "not smart" tracks early on without considering that there are a lot of social factors that go into being smart and intelligent. Family background is a key factor and the "separate and unequal" in our nation's school systems is another big factor. You also have kids with behavioral, mental, and physical disabilities who are tracked into "special care" tracks where people ASSUME they have no intellectual capacity and just need to be drugged up or monitored. However, some of them are very smart and intelligent so it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Plus, it's hard to get "special care" teachers who actually have the expertise to also challenge some of these kids academically.
If kids don't know how to look stuff up in books, or look up journal articles on JSTOR and sit down and read them extensively, that's the parents' and teachers' faults. I have noticed that when young adults get to college, they think that "research" means to print off random info from a Google search and pass it off as scholarly and referee journal research. Part of it is students being lazy and the other part is that this society isn't training the future for more than intellectually unstimulating and unrigorous tasks/jobs. It begins with the family and THEN becomes the teachers' responsibilities.
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