[anon291]

'Teaching to the test' has not caused the drop in literacy. Rather, it's teaching reading using bizarre methods, like whole word recognition instead of phonics. This has nothing to do with 'teaching to the test', since phonics would teach more to the test than whole word anything. A phonetically competent adult would be able to make out almost any English word. A whole word one would not.

[SketchySeaBeast]

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, unless the teacher is poor"?

[anon291]

This 'truth' is not always true. For binary questions, teaching to measure makes sense

[SketchySeaBeast]

Unfortunately, "is someone literate" is not a binary question. There's a whole range of possible answers there.