Education and market incentives vs. democratic incentives

In theory, both local democracy and market-like mechanisms should generate incentives for US public schools to do a better job of educating children.

In theory, by introducing school choice and other free-market mechanisms, schools should face incentives to attract students, by providing a superior education to other schools, which will, therefore, become competitors.

On the other hand, this school choice dynamic might undermine tendencies towards local democratic accountability, in which locally-elected school boards represent the interest of parents and students. This dynamic should also, in theory, generate a superior education over time, through the efforts of parents to support the education of their students.

In theory, each of these mechanisms should work effectively.

What I wonder is if a third dynamic--a dynamic of central control--including poorly-designed legislation like "No Child Left Behind" (does anybody actually believe that standardized testing makes education better?) and restrictions on providing incentives for better teaching because of teachers' union's pressures has prevented our well-developed local democracy from doing it's job.

If these speculations are correct, it might not matter if we introduce free-market dynamics, because the root cause of the poor performance of our public education system in the states will not be effectively addressed.

Of course, this is all speculation. But I think I might have a way to test at least one of these ideas, at least in another policy area in some other countries (you won't be able go guess which!)