As a mom of 3 and a veteran of 15 cumulative years of elementary school I can catagorically state that you can have the best teacher in the school and still have a terrible year due to social issues. The mix of kids matters more. While the teacher is teaching the classroom is (hopefully) calm and controlled. It is when the little darlings are let loose for lunch and recess that the social issues crop up. You can have kids that just don't mix well. And the administrators won't know that until it's too late.

Dear God, YES. I remember having maybe one good, interesting, engaging teacher per year every year of high school (usually the English teacher). The rest didn't know or care anything about me and if I was falling behind did squat to help me catch up. Of vastly more importance was who I was trapped in classes with.

This is very true. I know when my sister was in elementary school her entire personality was practically ruined by her fellow classmates. The majority of teachers they had were good but the atmosphere of the class was just poison because of the personalities of her classmates. And this was a very small country school that only had one of each grade, so it's not like she could even be moved to another class to get away from them. It was just one of those really bad classes that fed off the negativity of one another, and I don't there was really much the teachers could do about it.

I don't have kids. I teach at the college level so that's where I'm coming from.

All of this is fine and dandy, but what do you think is going to happen when the kids get to college? Do you expect to have input at that level? Do you think you're going to sit on my classroom of adults (albeit 18) and have input?

Where does it end? At some point these kids need to be able to stand on their own and make their own decisions.

yes, they do think they will sit in on your class and have input. i teach high school, and i have parents( not many, thank god) who think we are going to come to a consensus about the contents of tests in a foreign language class...they don't know the language, or have any teaching experience or credentials, but they do know their child, so surely they should get a vote.