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Gilda, would one problem with "teaching to the test" be that you then concentrate on teaching factoids?
How would you formulate a lesson on the civil war that led the students to employ critical thinking skills to tease out the economic and cultural factors for themselves...or even better, to tease out that those two domains were relevant and then sift through the ramifications of that.
Would doing so encourage critical thinking skills whereas "teaching to the test" might leave them with an ability to retain information while lacking the ability to parse out the important information?
Loewen writes in Lies My Teacher Told Me that many of his students were unable to critically analyze many historical events due to the way in which they learned the facts. He attributes some of this to the mistruths given in piecemeal to students, but he doesn't place all the blame there. He also discusses the teaching format, where students read series of facts without a larger context to work those facts within.
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"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann
"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman
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