To borrow from the old quip on giving up smoking: Fixing public schools is easy — we’ve done it hundreds of times. Even with the billions of dollars in economic stimulus aid, public schools stand no chance of getting better until we dispel some empty theories about how to help them. 1. We know how to fix public schools; we just lack the political will to finish the job. Wrong. For the past 25 years, K-12 education has been at or near the top of most politicians’ domestic agendas. Candidates vie to become the ‘education’ president, governor or mayor. The public cries out for better schools and is even willing to pay higher taxes to get them. There is no shortage of strategies for education reform, either. The most famous (or infamous) is the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, with its federal mandates for rigorous student testing. School districts across the country have been flooded with other initiatives, too. Conservatives generally advocate breaking up teacher unions and privatization, while liberals call for more money, less testing and greater teacher autonomy. But nothing has succeeded. In 2006, experts at the Harvard-based Public Education Leadership Project concluded […]