BG, your post is quite long, so I won’t quote it, but here are my replies. Just because a school is rated a 1 doesn’t mean that there was something wrong with the measurement. There are several schools in SD a lone that have a 1. Hoover, Lincoln, and Crawford are a few HS in SD with a score of 1.
WRT my wife, like I said, her and a few others (valedictorians) end up going to prestigious universities and are doing well. But that’s a very small subset of the graduating class. Many don’t even graduate. Like I said, bad school is not a guarantee that your kids will be pregnant or a gang banger. It just mean a larger portion of the student body are getting into those activities.
If you think it’s easy for “teachers are teaching students using rote memorization techniques to the test and nothing more.”, then why aren’t all schools getting a 10 on their API score.
Going back to your RE point, to some it is, to others, it’s not. We all have different priority. Why are you faulting others for having different priority than yours? To some, an area with low score IS worse, because that’s high in their priority list. I know I would never by a place in an area with test score <7/8. Some other have higher standard than I do. School's API score is not the ONLY factor people look at when buying a house. But it is one factor. How important it is depends on the individual.