I live in the 2nd largest school district in Illinois. While year after year graduation rates increase (much to the cheerleading of the teachers union, and of course they immediately follow that cheerleading with calls for pay raises), our ACT scores have fallen dramatically over the same period. So much so, that last year the district switched over to SAT. Now the baseline has been cleared, so we won’t have data to compare ACT scores over the last 2 decades district wide. I was told by a board member that the average ACT score for our district (it was required that all students take the ACT) was 11. 11! But of course they can brag about everyone graduating (oh, and every year more and more students receive a 3.5 GPA or greater in our district, and they brag about this too... amazing). Less than half the students in our state meet the national benchmarks for college, and less than 1/3 meet the benchmarks for math. But by golly they graduate! and with honors! https://magoosh.com/hs/act/2016/average-act-score-by-state/
That is why standardized tests are needed.
They do the same thing here in California with various curriculum ... switch it out every several years so there is no ability to compare current with previous student performance to see if the new one is better.
And you can bet every new curriculum ushered in by the school districts is connected to an important political donor who then shares the contract dollars, courtesy of the taxpayers, with the legislators who approved it.
We could save everyone a lot of time and expense by just asking all of them what degree they want and handing them the paper. Stop the pretense that there is real education happening.