There are several issues here: standardized testing, the format of tests, and high stakes testing.
I don't have a problem with the idea of standardizing assessment. There needs to be some sort of standardization. To give an example, I went to a private school and my gpa might have been lower than students at the local public school, but when it came time to take the ACT, my scores were in the top 6 percent of my state, in the top 8 percent of the nation, but only in the top 15 percent of my school. That meant that I scored higher than just about everybody at that public school, but lower than 15% of my classmates, yet my gpa was lower than people at the public school who scored much lower than I did on the ACT. That's because the expectations at my school were higher. So if everything depended on gpa and there were no standardized testing, I wouldn't be accepted into higher learning while people in the public school would.
But the real purpose of standardized testing is to test the education is because of No Child Left Behind, to make sure that students in schools around the country are not being left behind with regards to the standards.
The problem is that these sorts of tests are objective, and therefore often arbitrary.
The other problem is when these are high stakes. I certainly don't think any kindergarten child should have to take any high stakes tests. They should be held to certain standards and should not be moved into the next level unless they can demonstrate the benchmarks because that wouldn't be fair to them, but that can be anecdotal.
I'm not familiar with the sorts of tests given in kindergarten, but I can envision tests designed to help teachers determine if the children can demonstrate the skills and knowledge they will need to succeed on the next level. I hope the tests are designed that way, but I don't have a lot of faith that they are, because they end up being a "test" of teachers.
