I didn't say good or bad but it is not the thing you were seeming to try for.

I'm not trying for either side of this.

But the school does not decide everything. Parents have lots of input.

The only input that matters is who teaches and what they teach. They have no influence over the former and little over the latter.

What kind? Realize that the big issue these days is against standardized testing. And what does it tell you if teacher A had students last year get an average of 92 and teacher B's students go 85? Or did you mean testing the teachers? If so that just pushes the question down the road: what are you going to test?

Maybe standardized testing doesn't work at all. I'm not opposed to getting rid of them completely, but you seemed to suggest that you needed proof of success in order to try new ideas and choose what strategies to imitate. It would be/is hard to determine exactly what test results show, but allowing different schools to try different things allows schools to develop new and personalized ideas based off what they see elsewhere, regardless of whether or not there is evidence of prior success. Proof is almost irrelevant in a subjective environment, so maybe we agree here. Testing teachers is equally as useless.

And I think that teachers are far from the weakest link here. Talk to some teacher, they don't tend to be the problem.

Everyone has talked to a teacher before, so I'm not sure how that advances your argument at all. It doesn't matter how far teachers are from being the weakest link. They don't tend to be the problem, but they also don't tend not to be the problem. We can't prove this either way. So why not make it local and community oriented? The underlying assumption that I think you have, and tell me if I'm wrong, is that some people (educated professionals, licensed teachers, etc.) know better how to properly educate children than parents who have no education background or parents who have what you consider to be backwards world views (e.g. creationism, other crazy stuff like that). To me, this is inherently elitist and ultimately wrong. Also, there are just as many bad teachers as there are bad carpenters, but bad carpenters can't get tenure.