My wife taught first through fifth grade from ~2004 until 2017.

One thing that was evident to me from the sidelines was how much admin work was continually added to her workload without any consideration for the amount of class time she had. The focus on data derived from continuous testing of the students resulted in her and her peers sticking ever more closely to a continuously disrupted and rotated collection of commercially sourced curriculum and materials.

Her role as educator started to take a back see to classroom management and data collection. Add in differentiated instruction, where she was held accountable to develop personalized lesson plans for individual students and asked to track all of that and you end up with way too much workload to stay engaged and engaging year after year.

She was in a pretty good school district. A friend of mine had a similar role in a city district for a regional metro area and her students were horrific. She felt physically unsafe and ultimately quit.

It's a complex problem with many contributing factors. It's difficult to experiment when the future of the students in front of you could be negatively impacted by any mistakes made (not to mention job/test scores/etc) so everyone just rides the rail all the way down.

Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics | Hacker News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47867755