I don't get it

I just read in the New York Times, Make School a Democracy, about educational structure - to give it a really brief summary, it's about the benefits of letting students collaborate and develop their own experiments rather than regurgitating single-target answers on test after test after test.

Here are some other recent articles  -
Washington Post: Ten obvious truths about educating kids that keep getting ignored.
Harvard Ed Magazine: What's Worth Learning in School?
Government Executive: Will Smart Robots Take Your Job?

I've been seeing these articles about educational structure with a strong side dose of child development for years and they all say basically the same thing: we should not be pushing hard-core academics at an early age for children, kids need to play because that is their learning process rather than taking time away from it, the arts and physical activity support and promote brain development, and collaboration and interest-led projects are beneficial to both social development and career readiness. They also talk about what is bad for children: the current iteration of high-stakes standardized testing.

But as a society in the United States, we keep doing the same thing. And we keep digging even deeper and harder into it - it's all about The Test. Education policy makers in the US keep doing the exact opposite of all of these child development benchmarks that I keep reading about. What. The. Heck?!?!?

Lest you think that I'm cherry-picking and only reading articles that trash Common Core ... I'm looking. I am deliberately looking for articles that support Common Core. What I have found is that the people who are actually putting Common Core into practical use in their classrooms, or are parents who have children in those classrooms don't like it. They don't like it to the point that they're quitting their jobs as teachers and trying to find a new career track. That's pretty extreme. It's been a disaster from the word Go. The only people who have written articles in support of Common Core are politicians or the people who wrote it, and a rare school district administrator. Never the people who are actually doing Common Core. I have not yet found a teacher or parent or student published in the wide world of Online supporting Common Core.

I am completely baffled.