[WS:] I agree with your capitalism trope :) but take exception to your predictive validity claim. It is like saying that prayers and divinations are producing rain. In reality, people perform magic rituals during drought if they do not know any better, and the rain is eventually bound to fall at some point. There is zero predictive validity in these rituals, whether they use magic or standardized testing.
Most jobs require cognitive tasks that most people are fully capable of performing with relatively little training. What is more, most people learn these job-specific cognitive tasks on the job not in school. The only thing they learn in school that is of crucial significance for their job performance is decoding information. With the exception of research institution, the general school-learned skills required for most jobs (except perhaps research institutions) is reading, writing and symbol manipulation at the 6th grade level math. Everything else can be is learned on the job.
So claiming that schools, especially tertiary level schools - are indispensable for jobs is basically bullshit produced to justify the outrageous tuition they charge. There is very little beyond teaching basic cognitive skills that schools can provide for the job market. And standardized testing is the last thing they need to accomplish it.
This whole brouhaha about improving school performance, testing an related bullshit has nothing to do with education and everything to do with money. Testing is a very lucrative business and there is a lot of money to be made by privatizing public schools and subsidizing them with taxpayer money. But stating it plainly would offend middle class sensibilities, hence the bullshit about improving performance, teaching job skills etc.
Complaining that this is somehow due to "logic of capitalism" in general - it is like Germans complaining about intolerance and violence in general, while ignoring the fact that it was their particular country, not humanity in general, that was responsible for one of the worst instances of intolerance and violence in modern history. These specific policies have names and addresses It is not capitalism, but American politicians, businessmen, policy makers, jurists, pundits, journalists etc. who are responsible for barbarism that this kind of discourse subsumes under the rubric of the abstract notion of "capitalism." So the point is not to fight abstractions but bring those responsible to justice - by any means necessary. It will be the greatest day of the 21st century when they start extraditing Americans to The Hague.
Wojtek