You can hardly blame that just on Gates. Every moron in the government has been pushing standardized tests as some way of grading teachers and schools for decades at this point, and this program coincided with Obama's equally disastrous and very similar federal program. Which was an improvement over Bush's even more disastrous program.

Especially when you realize Gate's program was of limited scope while Dubbya/Obama/Trump's DOE's fuckups covered the entire country for a far longer period of time.