Ayed seigh oui still kneed to noooooooooooooooo aetlist uh fyu baysix.
Tests aren't the measure of all things. However, they do measure what you've learned and gauge them against minimum standards. STAAR and CC-based tests are not meant to find brilliance. Esp. since public schools aren't meant for the 0.01% but for the masses. Standardized tests have their uses.
Moreover, since brilliance is usually based not on manipulation of value-free entities but on finding connections between things and juxtapositioning them in novel ways, typically you need facts and knowledge before genius. One way of finding brilliance is to see whether a deep set of facts and skills are mastered. For this we don't need tests that measure "mastery" at 75% over essential skills, but tests that go broad and deep. Arguably we need both kinds of tests. Broad and deep tests have piss-poor scores, though, and parents hate them (meaning politicians and administrators and social activists hate them, too).
Tests are like screwdrivers. Screwdrivers are not appropriate for shaping the belly of a fine violin, so I guess you can say that screwdrivers are pretty useless. A violin bridge is pretty useless. But I'd say "screwdrivers are pretty useless for shaping the belly of a fine violin, but if I'm trying to screw a brace to the wall that's what I'd want. Not a violin bridge. But when playing a Beethoven romance on my violin, I'd like the violin bridge, thank you, because a screwdriver would probably damage the varnish and not sound all that good." We confuse tools with uses and then conclude that a tool is bad because it doesn't have a use it's not proper for.
"Bad", except in a certain kind of moral sense, is a two-place predicate (I'd argue that it always is, but in the moral sense it's a bit harder to justify). "John's bad" is different from "John's bad at spaying cats," and "John's bad at spaying cats" doesn't contradict "John's bad at spaying cats but you should see him synthesize organic compounds in the lab!" "Useless" is the same: It's another two-place predicate. Useless(x, y), where x is the subject and y is a purpose clause.
We don't get lost in the details. We go astray in the generalities.
It's easier to argue against a thing's use than against a use for a thing just as it's easier to keep a cat out of the house (so as to keep it out of the laundry room) than it is to just keep it out of the laundry room.
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