The administration today is about as untrustworthy as it gets, having become a vector of ideology. Parents are responsible for their children, and their primary teachers, not administrators, not teachers, and so they have more than just a say, but the deciding say; all other authority are deputized. I seriously doubt that parents are the primary reason for the mediocrity of education standards, but even if they were, it is parents that must be convinced that a curriculum is good. This is non-negotiable.

There are also plenty of counterexamples of parents, fed up with the poor quality of the savage factory that is the public school, coming together to form new private schools that surpass the standards of public education. These parents may not be representative, perhaps, but laying the blame at the feet of parents while valorizing administration, I claim, doesn't reflect reality adequately and certainly not constructively. In general, I am favor of more school choice and local initiative which would free parents to pursue models of excellence that could then be copied by other parents and even public schools (fat chance).