This is at the start of Yardsticks, a book about child development.
It reminds me of what happens in large businesses — executives define metrics, then set the expectation that those metrics will be met. Often those metrics are nowhere close to a complete measurement of success. Either way, there are now numbers to point at. Managers can then select other numbers and tell workers "hit that; not hitting that is a disappointment."
This doesn't really work in a lot of situations. It's basically an elaborate version of the management strategy Homer Simpson used during his short stint working for Hank Scorpio. He asked three guys who were typing, "Are you working hard?" They answered "Yes." Then, he asked, "Could you work a little harder?" They answered, "Yes," then typed faster.
In the case of workers, they often can't do what they're doing "but even more". (At least not reasonably. You can, of course, make people live in fear and suffering like Amazon famously does in its fulfillment centers.) Often, managers should be thinking of what they should be doing differently, not squeezing numbers out of people.
In the case of children, they literally cannot do certain things. For example, left-to-right visual tracking is not completely developed in most five-year-olds. Reading is going to be slow at best under those conditions.
You have to work with the grain, not say "kindergartners should be writing sentences" and assume that pressuring will make it happen. They're all different, and making them do something before they have the brain development to do it may convince them that it's a waste of effort.
Finland, considered to have the best education in the world (ironically, determined via standardized testing that they do not do otherwise) doesn't put kids into school until they're seven and well-developed enough to learn from school. (That's second grade in the US.) And even then, they do a lot of playing.
I'd bet the US "hit the metrics via pressure" approach to education comes from its misplaced idolization of big business, but I think both fields find the approach to be resonant because of Puritan cultural roots. There's an assumption here that the doers (students, workers) are at fault, that they lack a pure strength of will, and whipping is the only answer.