Among Don Quixote's many contributions to life forever is the word "quixotic." As an outrider amid the windmills of public policy and popular culture, I increasingly find "quixotic" to be one of the most apt tools in my vocabulary. Among its many listed synonyms one finds: idealistic, crazy, starry-eyed, mad, unrealistic, utopian and impractical.

You've guessed by now that our subject for another week is fixing the nation's public schools (with apologies to 16th-century windmills, which however quaint or comic got the job done; the schools don't).

Recall that last week we discovered a survey of opinion polls about public schools, published by Public Agenda in New York City. Many papers around the country published the Associated Press's account, which began: "Ill-mannered pupils, demoralized teachers, uninvolved parents and bureaucracy in public schools are greater worries for Americans than the standards and accountability that occupy policy makers, a new study says."

That seemed a good sentence upon which to erect some thoughts on how a once-fine school system went bad. But I never got around to the thoughts. The survey data, on what parents, teachers, principals, professors and employers think of our tax-supported schools, itself turned out to be a page-turner; like Stephen King's horror novel, you could have called it "The Dead Zone." (Sitting next to a federal judge a few days ago, I mentioned the finding that the percentage of professors who think high schools teach students the basics is 31%; "sounds awfully high," he replied.)

President Bush is the latest public figure to tilt at the broken schools, with a program called No Child Left Behind. His lance is withholding federal money from failure; it might work. New York's Mayor Bloomberg has his own ambitious effort. We wish them Godspeed. But a woman who read the column, Bonnie Hughes of Rome, Georgia, sent in some valuable thoughts from the memory bank:

"I keep a tattered copy of 'What Works -- Research About Teaching and Learning,' circa 1986 from the U.S. Department of Education, William J. Bennett, Secretary. We already know what works. I mean how is it that after 12 long years in a seat, children are not physically strong, nutritionally sound, financially literate, civically literate, historically literate, mathematically literate (you get the idea); and they have no clue how to excel?!"

Whether you think public schools are mortally wounded (as I do of inner-city schools) or merely history's largest reclamation project, these temples of gross underlearning sit among us as an important cautionary tale: Don't make the wrong decisions about a nation's most valuable institutions. Building them up is long, hard work; tearing them down, easy.

Virtually every horror revealed in the Public Agenda surveys can be traced to a legally or contractually binding decision made by some other institutional authority. These were the crucial mistakes.

In 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, ruled that the Constitution forbids local schools from suspending students who bring political protest inside the schools. In his dissent, Justice Black wrote: "This case, wholly without constitutional reasons in my judgment, subjects all the public schools in the country to the whims and caprices of their loudest-mouthed, but maybe not their brightest, students." Now we know: He was right.

Two years later, in Goss v. Lopez, the Court established and enumerated the due-process procedures to which a student suspended for less than 10 days is entitled. In dissent, Justice Powell wrote: "One who does not comprehend the meaning and necessity for discipline is handicapped not merely in his education but throughout his subsequent life."

Justices Black and Powell prophesied the conditions of disorder and disrespect now decried in the Public Agenda polls. They were in the minority.

You can argue back on the majority's behalf, but a lot of principals quickly posited their own dictum: Why bother. In the years since, courts and legislatures gave the neighborhood school yet another big legal obligation: Mainstream and educate severely disabled students. There is a rights-based argument for doing this, but many effective principals came up with a counter- argument: I quit.

Another bad decision: In 1962, President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 10988. That famous order led to state laws permitting the unionization of public employees, including teachers, who'd previously been protected by civil-service law. We know the theoretical arguments here, too, but the daily reality is that teachers' unions in the big cities have become about as subtle as the United Mine Workers in the 1940s. Merit raises for top teachers? Curriculum changes? Don't even think about it. So no one does.

Curriculum, what students actually learn, is another chipped brick in the institutional edifice of our schools. We now have "The Language Police," education historian Diane Ravitch's meticulous but horrifying narrative of how the major textbook publishers, the testing companies and state education departments have reduced what public-school kids learn to politically correct, politically laughable pabulum and swill. Ms. Ravitch's new book is must reading for anyone who wants to learn why (my conclusion, not hers) so many kids would rather listen to hip-hop songs on their headphones than read what's now in their textbooks. Answer: The rappers use bigger words.

* * * What all this means, among many other things, is that politics matters, however aimless it may seem. Wrong political decisions can be viral, weakening and killing healthy institutions for years. So let's end cheerfully on a note of political rancor. For the Democratic Party there is good news and bad news on education. The good news is that the Democrats own the public schools. The bad news is Democrats own the public schools -- their unions, their curriculum-cleansing, court cases they brought and won. Their solution: Spend more money on what now exists. And people wonder why Karl Rove always looks like a happy man.