According to the passage, public officials use...

Câu hỏi: Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 31 to 35.
While previous generations of American students have had to sit through tests, never have the tests been given so frequently and never have they played such a prominent role in schooling. Exams used to be administered mostly to decide where to place kids or what kind of help they needed; only recently have scores been published in the newspaper and used as the primary criteria for judging children, teachers, and schools indeed, as the basis for flunking students or denying them a diploma, deciding where money should be spent, and so on. Tests have lately become a mechanism by which public officials can impose their will on schools, and they are doing so with a vengeance.
This situation is also unusual from an international perspective. "Few countries today give these formal examinations to students before that age of sixteen or so," two scholars report. In the US, we give standardized tests to children as young as six, despite the fact that almost all experts in early childhood education condemn this practice. And it isn't easy to find other countries that give multiple-choice tests to students of any age.
In short, our children are tested to an extent that is unprecedented in our history and unparalleled anywhere else in the world. Rather than seeing this as odd, or something that needs to be defended, many of us have come to take it for granted. The result is that most of today's discourse about education has been reduced to a crude series of monosyllables: "Test scores are too low. Make them go up."
(Adapted from "Advanced Reading" by John Lane.)
According to the passage, public officials use standardized tests to _______
A. impose their will on schools
B. decide where to enroll their own children
C. decide where to place kids
D. humiliate failing students