Standards Smandards

I really don't believe that anyone benefits from the standards being set with standardized testing. The test are biased and so unrelated to the kids' lives that it's tough for the teacher to make this type of "teaching to the test" interesting in any manner for the students and then the students suffer because they are being asked to learn terms in such a non-related, unintersting way. It's ridiculous when it comes down to the fact that this test determines how much funding the school gets and how "smart" the students are when most of the questions are skewed themselves. For instance a vocab word would be imbedded in a question about golf. Well, not many inner city kids ever got a chance to learn what a "putter" is or what "the green" is. So there's one wrong on the test, not because they didn't know what the vocab word meant, but rather they didn't understand the context it was being used in. This is just another example of the "hidden curriculum" that's emerging slowly to teachers' attention. In my other class, a student teacher witnessed her students feeling so unmotivated to do good in these tests because the students know how boring and how unsatisfactory these tests. Another reason was because the co-op teacher was demanding them to practise taking other tests very similar to the standardized test in order to become familiar with the structure hoping they would in turn do well on the actual test. However, this backfired and the students just became fed up and frustrated. How else can we determine if our kids across the states are learning without having to hand out and complete these nonsense tests that are just a burden on the learning/ teaching process?