It is a lot more complicated than that. There are some people in the system trying to extract money, but they are mostly associated with Pearson and the like. Most of the administrators, coaches, and other non-teacher employees started off in the education field wanting to improve the lives of children, but found themselves trapped in a system that is built of perverse incentives from top to bottom.

It is impossible to change the trajectory of a community in one or two years, but the political powers demand measurable results before the next election. The administrators are trapped: they have risen high enough through the system that they are making more money than they ever could as a teacher, and their personal spending expanded enough so they can't go back without significant personal sacrifice (on top of the sacrifices they already made when choosing to work in education). They realize that goosing test scores isn't good for the students, but they rationalize it by telling themselves that if they can manipulate the test scores enough to get central administration off their back, then they can implement the real changes they want. But nothing short of a meteoric improvement will placate the people high enough in the system to be exposed politically, and everyone in middle management is trapped in a cycle of telling themselves, "We just need to do this distasteful stuff this year, so we can really fix things next year."

I was a high school teacher for 9 years, and literally every single year I had an administrator tell me about the plans they had for how they would fix things in the next school year once the test scores improved.