the American public schooling system is not about learning, but rather how to jump through hoops.
This. That is essentially what elementary through high school education boils down to. It's not about knowing the material and proving your competence so much as satisfying your teachers and the curriculum's specific standard of required work ethic.
Back in High School, I could ace any test you threw down in front of me. I was just naturally smart. Unfortunately for me, that doesn't properly translate to the current academic standard or effort over ability. I blew off work constantly because I wasn't learning shit from it. I always felt that it was pointless for me to do a ten page essay on the reasons the Great Depression occurred when I could just as easily, at the time, tell you exactly why in under a paragraph.
In elementary school, I coasted by on my testing, because you didn't really have out of school work. Everything was done in the classroom then. As soon as homework and shit like that started cropping up, I started falling apart. It became rigorous hand-holding for kids who just couldn't get it on their own and those of us who could handle ourselves got thrown by the wayside.
I remember graduating with one of the higher SAT scores and probably one of the top ten IQs in my graduating class, but I was out GPAd by a girl who thought Buddhism was a fucking eating disorder (I shit you not, one high honors student in my graduating class somehow mixed up Buddhism with bulimia).
Teachers of good quality can only do so much too. I had one teacher who knew and acknowledged how smart I was, but his hands were tied by his curriculum. I had one teacher who, to the classes faces, said that A through F grading systems were a fat load of shit. There's only so many ways any one teacher can do to challenge the system. I'm of the mind that it all needs to be chucked and reworked from the ground up and the first thing that needs to be eliminated is standardized testing. I may have done well in it, but I was also smart enough to know that standardized testing needlessly shackles teachers to a forced curriculum. with little room for deviation unless they want their school to lose government funding.