Why Standardized Testing Gets in the Way of Real Learning

I've been reading Brian Cambourne's Responsive Evaluation: Making Valid Judgments About Student Literacy in my evening spare time. Nothing particularly revolutionary about the book to me- but I have really enjoyed it. It's not that often that I read something I can use the next day.
As a teacher, I have two ways to teach material: I can parcel it out and micromanage it (that would produce the kind of spreadsheets and bar graphs that would really impress someone like a parent or a principal) or I can teach the material holistically. You can guess which of these methods I prefer.
As a teacher, I can't just teach the material that's on the standardized tests given by my state. No knowledge exists in isolation, and to teach it in isolation is essentially a memorization skill. Since my brightest students seem to do poorly in memorization, it's clearly not an effective measurement of student aptitude. When you teach things in isolation, or in the memorize-it way, you have to be mindful that you may be teaching the wrong thing unintentionally. I'm thinking of my wife and I's work teaching analogies: she and I both have the same problem. We've been asked to teach analogies to children that haven't yet gotten a handle on abstract thinking. Believe it or not, they are a second grade standard in a lot of states.
That's the real problem with standardized testing- it prevents us from A) Teaching to the ZPD of students, and B)Teaching holistically. It doesn't make a lot of sense to teach a progressive plan and then assess students in a conservative way. By locking in a mandatory conservative testing method, the state has locked in conservative methods. Methods which, by the way, have been proven ineffective for well over 50 years.
But the pressure is so intense on administrators, because of NCLB and state expectations, that criticizing this kind of testing in public could be tantamount to career suicide. The last thing a teacher would want an administrator to think is that they don't take standardized tests seriously. So we're completely prevented from having this discussion in the first place- and it's far to important to keep out of the public forum.