What does the CBEST (CA Basic Ed Skills Test) measure?

Having decided to get directly in involved in California education from the ground up, even with a kind of "top-down" certification and expertise (Ph.D. in Philosophy of Education), I recently took the CBEST.  While waiting outside, I had some fun hearing accounts of those taking the test 16 or 17 times to pass one of the sections.  I'd taken the practice test online and noted how out-of-synch the questions to gauge a truly gifted, excellent teacher.  The title of the test should be "At least we know this teacher has two brain cells to rub together".  Almost every questions is designed around naming and solving (in a fairly simplistic way irrelevant to the emerging real issues of this era) what is in the head of the test maker, rather than developing the learning is in one's own head and that of prospective students.   Our educational system remains firmly industrial, top-down, administratively driven, and obsessed with quantifying fairly irrelevant bits of information that relate more to one's ability to measure ("usefulness" to research and our need to number things) than any real practical need a learner or teacher will face.  

Many of the questions I experienced were of the order.  "This reading selection represents best what type of persuasion....  A) plain folks approach, B) appealing to logic, C) appealing to emotion, D) compare and contrast, etc.  Who cares if you can name the style?!  Can you actually argue from these perspectives?  Do you know their uses and limits?  Like many tests I've studied, including the self-esteem tests I critiqued in my dissertation, the test taker is treated as a dumbed-down puzzle solver and spectator to the "real action" where all the decisions and movement about what counts as knowledge and why is made by someone else.  Classic grid-obsessed, compartmentalized, stratified industrial mentality.  Earth to CBEST.  We are way past the Industrial Era.  How do your questions measure and prepare learners and teachers today to face environmental peril, global challenges, and a complex spaghetti-like world.