All good points, all worth thinking about.  Remarkably, the thrust of the article does not seem to be that testing or the need for schools to demonstrate Adequate Yearly Progress through testing is bad. It seems to be that we could do a better job devising tests.

Undoubtably we can. If state legislatures and education agencies want better tests, the market will produce them. But not at the same price as today. As the article implies, better instruments for assessing student performance will be more complex - and they will be processes rather than events. And that will cost more than having a student sit down for a few hours filling in bubbles. Each of these seems to be on the order of $15 per student, although each student takes multiple tests. Moreover, there seems to agreement that the system needs more, different takes on student performance, rather than substituting something better. 

The problem here is less the market and more what the system and taxpayers are prepared to pay. Until then, the crude system we have today is what will be used to judge student performance and AYP.

Why? Because something beats nothing.

Ironically, this seems to argue for the teachers unions to call for still more testing.
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Little Jimmy opens his test booklet and reads:

What number goes in the box to make this number sentence true?_11 –   ?    = 2

Your whole year's work has come down to this. If he gets the right answer, your school is on its way to the modern Holy Grail: Adequate Yearly Progress. If not, you're a failure.

But how did that question get in front of him?

Each year, hundreds of millions of test questions are developed, answered, and scored. Some 45 million tests required by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, better known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), will be administered this year. The industry rakes in more than half a billion dollars a year for these tests, but its spokespeople insist their profit margins are tight because of fierce competition and ultra-tight deadlines. To you, it may seem slow if you get your scores in six weeks, but for them, the pace is frantic.

These one-size-fits-all instruments increasingly dictate what educators do for most of the rest of the year. (That, incidentally, is what “standardized” means: the same test taken under the same conditions by all those wildly different students.)

The big question: Has the focus on tests produced students who are better educated or more competitive in the world economy? Probably not. High national test scores don't correlate with healthy economies, according to a study by researcher Keith Baker….

What's the alternative? We could make more use of a testing apparatus that adjusts to every child, evaluates results quickly, and immediately makes appropriate changes in instruction: the human educator. That's why NEA and more than 100 education, civil rights, minority, religious, and other organizations have signed a joint manifesto urging Congress to change NCLB so schools will no longer live or die according to test scores…..

“What upsets me,” says test consultant Scott Marion, “is that a lot of states were moving to richer tasks [in their tests] in the 1990s, but that’s slipping away. And teachers tend to model the kinds of questions they see on the state test.” Marion is vice president of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, a non-profit that advises 15 states on their tests….

Does all the pain that students and teachers are going through because of high-stakes testing serve a greater purpose? Is it raising student achievement?

The answer appears to be no.

In October 2005, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is the only national testing program, reported the first results in which a significant impact from the NCLB testing program should have shown up. There wasn’t any….

Yet many states are boasting of big gains on state tests. Why do state scores jump while national scores are level or rising slowly? Harvard University testing expert Daniel Koretz has seen this before, and he has a one-word explanation: “Coaching.”

On a test, he points out, “we can’t test kids on everything they’ve learned in math, so we just test them on 45 questions.” If the pressure to raise scores becomes great enough, teachers focus on the particular elements they know will be tested.

“In the last few years, the situation has become absolutely egregious,” Koretz says. “They’re bringing in people from the outside to tell teachers what to skip, what to throw out.”…

So what can be done to make tests reflect reality?

First, educators should set realistic expectations for student scores, Koretz says. Tests should also be written so they’re harder to coach for. If the subset of topics found on the test changes from year to year, schools will be less likely to narrow their teaching. “But that would produce smaller gains—more meaningful, but smaller,” he adds. “And nobody wants that.”

Koretz also echoes the growing call, supported by NEA and more than 100 other organizations, for assessments based on multiple measures of student performance….“That’s not to say tests shouldn’t be in the mix,” he says, “but there’s a lot more going on in classrooms than we can capture with a single test.”

Alain Jehlen, NEA Today, April