Well, the teaching to the test quality still remains, but schools have been doing that for decades. I've taken the TAKS test, as mentioned above, as well as the Louisiana and California equivalents (LEAP and CATS respectively).

The main goal of these new policies are to make sure that kids in Silicon Valley, California or the suburbs of Dallas, Texas (two of the better public school systems in the country) are on the same level as kids from inner-city New York or downtown Washington D.C. (some of the worse schools you can put a kid in).