My email response to a leader seems to deserve a place on this blog:
The purpose of education is to help people learn. Learning is a natural physiological process of the human brain.
Nature, then, defines the rules within which educators (and education policy makers) must play. While it might be convenient for policy makers to define test scores as a measure of learning, those tests (the the associated policies) may be contrary to the nature of learning.
Nature will not accommodate us. Our education policies must be adjusted to reflect the nature of learning.