In a recent blog post, “Why I Tried…and Failed…to Fire Verizon”, I described the systemic screw-ups and service break-downs that led me to try to switch my phone and internet service from Verizon to Time Warner, and the systemic screw-ups and misleading sales tactics (thanks to boneheaded pay incentives) that convinced me to stick with Verizon, on the the-devil-you-know-is-better-than-the-one-you-don’t theory.

Having abandoned my efforts to fire Verizon and switch to Time Warner, I encountered yet another breathtaking breakdown in quality and service as I tried to reactivate my Verizon account. My fling with Time Warner lasted only three hours, in which an able and courteous Time-Warner technician tried, unsuccessfully, to switch my service to the competition. But that brief flirtation cost me phone and internet service for almost a month. Moreover reactivating the internet service proved so complicated that I couldn’t get it to work without hiring an independent computer consultant!

The hiatus in which I had to rely on my cell phone and broadband wireless device were marked by over a dozen calls to Verizon over a one-week period and a mind-boggling number of systemic snafus on the company’s part. It turned out that the earliest date Verizon could give me for reactivation was three weeks from the day I said my tearful goodbyes to Time Warner. I was, understandably, anxious to avoid any mishaps. So I phoned the company three days before the scheduled appointment, only to be told that it was a good thing I had called because my service order had “not been completed” and, had I not called, no one would have showed up.

On January 23, the day of my appointment, a Verizon technician arrived at my home. After less than 10 minutes, in which he placed a few calls to Verizon’s central office, but seemed to perform no work inside my home, he explained that the service really needed to be switched on from Verizon’s central office. That might take as much as 24 hours.

Was there really nothing more for him to do, I asked, baffled as to why I had to wait for three weeks and stay home to await the technician if, in fact, all the work was done from a remote office.

No, he reassured me, there was nothing more to do but wait.

Sure enough, about 24 hours later, the phones were working again. Although, my answering service, which I had, in the past contracted from Verizon, had disappeared. Clearly this would involve more phone calls and more bureaucracy. Sigh.

A bigger problem was that my internet service wasn’t working either. When I checked back with the company, I was told that a mistake had been made (how many was this now?) and Verizon had not initiated the transfer process. After four phone calls (I was disconnected twice) and 1.5 hours on the phone with a technician, I still didn’t have internet service, but was told that someone else would phone me the following morning to resolve the problem. Instead, that same night, I received an email from Verizon, notifying me that they had received my CANCELLATION order, effective Jan. 30. CANCELLATION—I had just spent one month trying to RESTORE my service!!

The cruelest joke of all was that the cancellation notice came with the following reassurance: “We will hold your current verizon.net email address and your User ID for you for 30 days from the date of this message. That way, coming back is easy!”

It turned out that returning to Verizon’s fickle embrace would be anything but easy. The following morning, I called Verizon again and was told that I would have to wait several more days as this “new order” was processed.

Since I had already been without internet for a month, and since the error was clearly Verizon’s, could they not expedite my service, I asked the friendly service rep on the phone.

“Certainly, madam, I will make every effort to have your service expedited,” said the impeccably polite technician who I ascertained was located in Verizon’s Philippine service center. In the ensuing days, I made a grand tour of Verizon service centers—in the Philippines, in India, in Ireland, and eventually New York– speaking to easily a dozen technicians, all of them unfailingly polite and helpful. But, as the week wore on, no one seemed able to reactivate my internet service. Nor could any of them explain why; most seemed as baffled by the problem as I was. At around Day Four, I started tweeting about the problems again; when Verizon’s social media folks got involved, they enlisted the company’s New York-based service center. Now, perhaps, the company would take this issue seriously, I thought, mistakenly assuming that Verizon’s New York crew would succeed where their far-flung global colleagues had failed.

Technicians at Verizon's far-flung service centers were unfailingly polite... but were baffled by the company's faulty systems

But after a full week of fruitless efforts to get my internet service turned on, I completely lost whatever shred of faith I had left in the company. So, on Jan. 30, I recruited Vladimir Sokolov (aka Vlad), the trusted computer consultant who helps me with my most vexing tech issues. Vlad spent 3.5 hours on the phone with Verizon technicians. He finally got the system working, despite Verizon’s best efforts, it seemed…and without ever getting an explanation from Verizon as to why they had so much trouble “reactivating me.”

“Verizon is a big and disjointed company,” explained Vlad who has done work for me on-and-off over the course of several years. “It seems that the sales department doesn’t know what customer service department is doing, and both are clueless about what the technical department is doing.”

For example, Vlad figured out that Verizon doesn’t have a procedure for reinstating old customers. They treat every returning customer as a new customer. The fact that I already had a Verizon footprint—see aforementioned User ID and email address in the cancellation notice–seems to have made it harder, not easier, for me to get reinstated.

To make matters worse, Verizon seems to have a policy of not telling customers what’s going on. “For some puzzling reason Verizon feels that it should not tell the customer exactly what happened,” concluded Vlad. “It is frustrating that Verizon doesn’t have a policy of open and honest communication with its customers. This misguided need for secrecy is very often a cause for confused customers and delays in fulfilling orders.”

Of course, Verizon isn’t the only company that obfuscates and misleads its customers; that is, after all, why I ended my brief flirtation with Time Warner.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, I was not content to patiently troll Verizon service-centers around the world, charming as the technical-service people were. Even as I turned to Vlad for help, I decided to go straight to the top and sent an email to Peter W. Thonis, Verizon’s communicator-in-chief. His official title is Chief Communications Officer. However, Mr. Thonis chose not to communicate with me, and did not respond to several email messages pleading for help.

Thanks to Vlad, I am now reconnected to Verizon, at least until I can find an adequate alternative and recover from my latest telecom trauma. Vlad’s bill for reinstating my Verizon internet: $310. I guess the best you can say about Verizon technology and service is that it keeps competent guys like Vlad in business.

Next challenge: Get my voice mail back…

In brief, one of the big problems with corporate reformers is that they place most of the blame for the failures of the U.S. education system on teachers and teachers’ unions. If only you could get rid of the many bad apples, American education would be instantly transformed! The mantra is very similar to the rhetoric of a bankrupt auto industry, which blamed autoworkers and the UAW for its failure to compete against foreign producers. We now know that the U.S. industry’s long malaise was due to deep-rooted systemic problems and management failures; only when the car companies began focusing on long-term improvement—usually in collaboration with the unions—did they begin to recover.

Indeed, Hamill’s piece, “Pittsburgh’s Winning Partnership” describes what seems to be one of the rare examples of a  continuous improvement effort led by both administrators and teachers. What he describes sounds a lot like the early days of the remarkable teacher-led turnaround at Brockton High, Massachusetts’s once-failing, largest high school. Indeed, the Pittsburgh schools seem to have learned many of the same lessons as Brockton:

1)      Pittsburgh began with a common mistake—relying on outside consultants. But, after teachers rebelled against the curriculum that was being developed by Kaplan K12, then-superintendent Mark Roosevelt enlisted the help of an experienced team of teachers to both write the curriculum and to train the teachers in how to implement it. Training, of course, is a key to most continuous improvement efforts, including those in education, such such as Brockton’s. Also, enlisting the teachers in the process energized them and gave them a stake in the success of the reform effort.

“For Linda Lane, who was then the district’s deputy superintendent and is now Roosevelt’s successor, it was obvious that the district needed to go in a different direction. The district decided to let the teachers write the curriculum, but train them first, and develop a better feedback structure to evaluate what they produced. Engaging teachers in such a big way was the idea of Jerri Lippert, the district’s chief academic officer, who realized, ‘it’s kind of foolish not to listen to [teachers].’

“For the nearly 200 teachers directly involved in the training, writing, and feedback over two years, the process was transformational. ‘Before this, I was ready to quit. I was burned out and thinking of leaving teaching,’ said Adam Deutsch, who teaches math at Allderdice High School and was a lead writer for the district’s Algebra I curriculum. ‘But this really reenergized me.’ Many teachers appreciated the chance to contribute as professionals and became ‘advocates in our schools and outspoken about reform efforts,” when that wasn’t necessarily the case before,’ said Deutsch.”

2)      Using a collaborative approach, Pittsburgh developed a new teacher evaluation system. But instead of imposing a punitive plan aimed at weeding out “bad” teachers, as many corporate reformers advocate, the evaluation system became a professional development tool for improving long-term performance.

“’What I loved was that all the power players on this were in the room together—the union, the school district, teachers, principals—hammering out the details for the framework for RISE,’ said Cindy Haigh, a middle school health and physical education teacher for 13 years in the district who was part of the process.

“What they developed was a system where the teacher actively engages in his or her evaluation with an administrator. Both of them collect evidence across the school year of four teaching domains: planning and preparation, classroom environment, professional responsibilities, and teaching and learning. Class-room visits by an administrator are preceded and followed by discussions about the lessons being taught. The teacher provides a self-evaluation before the lesson using a rubric that breaks the four teaching domains into 24 components of practice, and the discussions between them focus on areas where they disagree. After each observation, the administrator and teacher meet again to review what was observed and agree on plans for improvement, which are revisited throughout the year and in a final evaluation.”

3)      Performance-pay in Pittsburgh is a misnomer. The union hated the idea, because, as the article, notes: “There simply was no proof anyone could find that performance-pay systems work well.” The fact that merit pay doesn’t work was well documented in a study by Vanderbilt Univ. John Tarka, head of the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers, noted one school where the performance-pay system was regarded as “winning the lottery,” a common complaint in companies that use performance pay too!

Instead, Pittsburgh developed a career-ladder approach that would create a new career path, with higher pay, for the most experienced teachers. They also reserved some funds for schools and districts that achieved improvement. Indeed, group rewards not only foster teamwork and do not suffer from the stigma of arbitrariness that plagues individualized pay incentives.

“In contrast, ‘if you provide, as we did, a number of career ladder positions, for which people apply and have to show their eligibility, that’s a key way to get performance pay in place that might work,’ Tarka said. ‘We’ve also done work so that school-wide performance can be recognized, district-wide performance can be recognized. A couple of the plans do recognize student achievement, but rather than do some of the negative things that some traditional performance-pay plans have done in terms of divide and alienate, it’s more based on a school working together and a district working together to try to raise student achievement overall.’”

What’s most noteworthy about the Pittsburgh plan is that it relied on close collaboration between the school district and the union.

I came away from reading Hamill’s article wondering whether Pittsburgh seemingly non-punitive professional-development approach to teacher evaluations, as well as its career-ladder, might influence the thinking of the Gates Foundation. Reading the first sentence of the grant it isn’t clear whether the Gates Foundation understands what seems to be unique about the Pittsburgh (and Brockton) experiments; i.e. the point is less to change (or exchange) the teachers as to create collaborative approaches to systemic improvement. (The first sentence of the grant reads: “The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will invest $40 million to support Pittsburgh Public Schools in the implementation of groundbreaking approaches to ensure that all students have access to effective teachers in every classroom.”)

What the Pittsburgh experiment seems to show—and what the Gates Foundation and other corporate reformers still don’t seem to get—is that the problems in schools aren’t primarily due to “bad” teachers, but to bad systems and leadership.

The best evidence for this is at Brockton, where the very same teachers who worked at the school when it was failing, have, over the course of more than a decade, transformed the institution under the leadership of the school’s principal, Sue Szachowicz. A former history teacher, Szachowicz has worked with her faculty to hone a laser-like focus on improving literacy at the school, with remarkable results. See “How a Decade-Long Literacy Obsession Transformed Brockton High.”

Brockton High has gained national attention and praise from Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick; hundreds of educators have been to visit the school and to hear Szachowicz speak at conferences. Yet, Brockton has not caught the attention of key education reformers. Arne Duncan has never been to see the school. Neither have representatives from the Gates, Broad or Walton Foundations. “We don’t fit their idea of school reform,” says Szachowicz.

Now that Pittsburgh seems to have embraced many of the same homegrown, collaborative, teacher-driven improvement efforts that have worked at Brockton, maybe the Gates Foundation—and other corporate-minded education reformers–will reconsider what it takes to transform a school or a school district.

Instead, I’m back with Verizon—not very happily—and without phone service for nearly two weeks. This is a story about lousy management and technology, deceptive marketing, misguided compensation schemes and the power of oligopoly. The silver lining—great low-level employees at both companies who tried to fix my problems and sometimes seemed as frustrated by their companies’ rules and systems as I was. (This is in keeping with other experiences I’ve had in which individual employees were almost never the problem–see my post on rental car companies.)

The story begins with Verizon, my long-time phone and internet provider. About three years ago, I also purchased a wireless device from Verizon Wireless, which cost an additional $60-or-so per month so that I would be covered when I travel and for the frequent occasions when Verizon’s DSL service is down. The device worked flawlessly until Verizon persuaded me to upgrade to a 4G device; in December alone, the company’s 4G network was down at least four times. The company claims that its service was “available approximately 99% of the time” in 2011; my experience does not support that claim.

Indeed, my problems with Verizon point to at least six major flaws in the quality of the company’s management and technology systems.

First, Verizon telephone service in my Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan is constantly having problems. I’ve lost phone service about half-a-dozen times in as many years; one of many Verizon repairmen to visit my house explains that the company’s underground wiring and networks need to be updated.

This December, even as I was trying to finish end-of-year assignments and do some holiday shopping online, I was hit with problems two and three– outages of my DSL service and problems with Verizon’s 4G wireless system.

It was during this perfect storm of internet failure that I discovered the fourth major problem with Verizon service. With both DSL and wireless on the blink, I tried calling Verizon’s technical service department only to learn that the company maintains two different teams of technicians—one for wireless and one for DSL. If you are unlucky enough to have problems with both systems, you need to call two different numbers, wait on hold (five to fifteen minutes each time) for two different sets of technicians. The technicians themselves, once I was able to get through, were without exception helpful, courteous and competent. In the weeks before Christmas, I spent about eight hours trying to resolve problems with two sets of Verizon technical support staff with two sets of service.

It was one of these wireless technicians who suggested to me that my problem might go beyond the failure of Verizon’s 4G system. The device itself—a small rectangular gizmo that sits on top of my computer and that was sent to me six months earlier with my 4G upgrade—might be flawed. And, he very kindly offered to send me another.

The only problem was that I was just days away from a working vacation and, for the first four days of my trip, there was no reliable place to send the new device. When I got to Sarasota, Fla, on the first leg of my trip, I drove by a Verizon store, thinking that I could just pick up a new 4G device. This is when I discovered the fifth major problem with Verizon customer and service quality. The manger at the Verizon store explained to me that he could not give me a device at the store because those devices are new and the replacement that Verizon would be sending me for my six-month old lemon was an old refurbished device. But, he suggested, not very helpfully, that I could always go to a Starbucks to use wireless until I am in a place long enough to get delivery of a new—or should I say used—4G device.

Meanwhile, my family was up in arms. For my daughter, who is about to apply to college, poor internet service was contributing to the stress of finishing her junior year at a very competitive high school. On the recommendation of my tech-savvy next-door neighbor, I decided to fire Verizon and switch to Time Warner, our cable provider.

The cable company promised—in what I have concluded was a case of deliberate deceptive marketing—to solve all my problems. In my initial phone call, a Time Warner salesman persuaded me to sign up for Time Warner’s Signature service, which promises cable, phone and internet plus premium 24-hour customer service for $199, more than double the company’s $99 promotion for the three services alone. But, given my limited technical skills and the problems that internet outages had caused me and my daughter, I decided to pay for the premium service. My salesman also promised that Time Warner would provide seamless wireless throughout my house—even after I explained how the thick walls in our building had proven a problem thus far. To ensure that the service was properly installed, he explained, a technician would phone me within 24 hours to get information about the configuration of our home and cable.

By the next day, I knew Time Warner wasn’t going to be the perfect solution to my connectivity problems. Twenty-four hours passed and the promised call from the technician never arrived. I placed a total of four calls to Time Warner during the week leading up to the day when Time Warner was supposed to install my service. I received just one message back—and that was left on my home phone even though during every conversation with Time Warner—including the one with the salesman who sold me the service—I told them to call my cell phone where I’m most easily reachable.

The day of my appointment, the technician had barely stepped over my threshold when I concluded that Time Warner might not be a solution at all. When I told him that I had been promised seamless wireless service throughout my house, the young man’s near-perfect poker face couldn’t disguise the fact that he’d heard this one before.

“No m’am,” said the young man, who told me his name was Ray and who was unfailingly polite during the entire three hours he would spend at my home trying to solve my connectivity problem. “We can’t give you seamless wireless service.” The walls are too thick and the configuration of the house will not allow it, he explained. I would need to buy repeaters and hope for the best.

Why did Time Warner promise they could do so? And why did the promised call from a technician not come through?

I was putting Ray on the spot, and he clearly did not want to impugn his employer. But during several hours I spent with Ray, his supervisor who phoned every 10 minutes or so–to make sure the sale went through–and other Time Warner representatives I spoke to on the phone in the week leading up to Ray’s visit, I pieced together the following: Time Warner technicians are NOT paid on commission; but, in my experience, they are thoroughly professional and do their level best to get the technology to work. The salesmen, and possibly the technicians’ supervisors, ARE paid on commission; and, they will say almost anything to make a sale, even if it costs customers and the company time and money.

Here’s what happened at my house: Not being avid TV watchers, we do not have cable in several rooms, including my home office. Roy figured out that he could set up a modem in my daughter’s room and it would cover my office as well. But, then, he explained that the phone service would also run via cable and I would have to rely on the modem in my daughter’s room, one floor down, to operate the phone in my office.

“Might I have problems with my phone service?” I asked Ray.

“It should work,” he said. But he would not promise that I might not occasionally have problems during periods of peak usage.

I had started this process with poor internet service. I was now facing the prospect of imperfect internet service plus possible problems with my phone. Moreover, when I asked Ray’s supervisor why I had been left on hold for 20 minutes during my last call to Time Warner, when I was trying to find out why I had never been called back by my set-up technician, he explained that my “Signature” service had not yet kicked in. So, even while Time Warner was trying to conclude a sale—and Ray and his supervisor spent nearly three-hours trying to figure out how to make the service work in my home—the company doesn’t allow new customers access to the “signature” service they have signed up for during the critical start-up phase.

At the end of the day, Ray and I shook hands. And I said goodbye to Time Warner. Oh, they will still provide my basic cable service. But for phone and internet, I am back with Verizon.

Or at least, I think I am. The night Ray left, I got an email from Verizon giving me seven days to restore my service. I called immediately and the Verizon technician I spoke to said that I could get my service back—but the earliest appointment he could give me was 10-days later. In the meantime, I would be without my home phone service.

Here’s what I learned. Both Verizon and Time Warner are doing a good job of hiring and training phone and technical personnel; during my technical travails, I spoke to over two dozen low-level employees at both companies. They were all terrific.

But, Verizon is either expanding too quickly or not investing sufficiently in its existing networks, or both. Moreover, the different parts of the company—Verizon wireless, phone and DSL service and its retail stores—don’t communicate; the company is not run as a seamless system.

As for Time Warner, it should probably stop paying those commissions. The best service I got from Time Warner was from low-level personnel and technicians who are NOT given incentive pay. Either the commission-system leads employees to promise what the company can’t deliver or the company encourages its sales personnel to make a sale at any cost.

The experience also left me with some questions: For example, is there really no wireless technology that would allow a cable company to run reliable virtual connections a few feet away from its physical cable—as a way to solve the connection problems in old buildings (without the costly expense of cutting into walls)?

My unhappy experience trying to switch providers reinforced my conviction, which I learned from W. Edwards Deming, that the answer to quality service is well-thought out systems and processes. Individual bonuses and incentives, as Deming pointed out, only cause problems. It also left me wondering about our telecommunications oligopoly. I was that rare consumer who was very upset when AT&T was broken up in 1982; whatever else you might have said about the old AT&T, it had a culture of customer service that dated back to Theodore Vale’s conviction that it could only protect its position as a telecommunications monopoly by providing first-rate customer service and infusing the company with a culture of professionalism and quality. Not surprisingly, one of the first and, to this day, most respected thinkers on leadership, Chester Barnard, was a life-long senior executive at AT&T.

Today’s telecommunications oligopoly offers neither real competition nor a culture of customer service and quality.

Yet, now George Anders has published yet another management book about the quixotic search for superstar employees. The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Anybody Else Does promises to “help you become much more effective at spotting talent,” with lessons from the U.S. Army, Teach for America etc.

The implication is, of course, that filling your company, sports team or school with superstars is the answer to getting ahead of the competition. Of course, real genius, like that of Steve Jobs, is really rare. The truth is that most organizations—the good, the bad and the mediocre—are filled with employees with a range of talent. Years ago, the statistician and management thinker W. Edwards Deming noted that the best organizations will probably have more high-performing employees because they are better at hiring and training—and at bringing out the best in their troops.

Another truth is that, most great organizations are full of people who have failed somewhere else. Brockton High, the largest high school in Massachusetts, which was on the brink of failure just a decade ago, achieved a remarkable turnaround by focusing on a winning literacy strategy that relied on retraining the very same teachers who had worked at the school during its most troubled years. Similarly, Toyota Motor Company— notwithstanding its most recent problems with quality and safety—became the world’s premier automaker by focusing, not on hiring stars, but on perfecting a systematic strategy that emphasized continuous improvement and learning at all levels of the company, including blue-color autoworkers, some of whom had once worked for the ever-shrinking Big Three. Even Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s’ legendary manager, built a winning team with players who had failed or aged out of the competition by focusing on their undervalued skills.

What Toyota, the Oakland As and the Brockton High have in common is strong management, a great strategy and teamwork. A search for stars has nothing to do with it.

Still, our mythic belief in the power of star talent has led the best companies to pursue strategies that aim to reward “star” performers and to punish laggards, sometimes with absurd consequences. Years ago, for example, IBM, even as it was marketing its employee-hiring and -training expertise, instituted a forced-ranking scheme that required all supervisors to identify and reward the “top” 10 percent of its employees and to give the “bottom” 10 percent a failing grade and just three months to improve their performance or be fired. It was no coincidence that the system was instituted during an economic downturn, and was widely seen as a way to get rid of employees without violating the company’s no-layoff pledge. (IBM’s bell curve violated—as it usually does—basic statistical rules: Bell curves only work when they are applied to large random samples—not to relatively small, carefully selected groups of employees.) Some IBM supervisors got around the problem by creating a “designated dummy” system, by which employees took turns getting a low ranking during performance reviews. Following an employee revolt, Big Blue eventually modified its forced-ranking system, but remained wedded to individualized pay and rankings.

Ironically, the rush to identify—and pay—star performers has now made it’s way from board rooms and ball fields to the education reform movement. Eric Hanushek, an economist at the Hoover Institution, has even suggested that schools rank teachers and fire the bottom 10 percent—either unaware, or indifferent to, IBM’s failure to institute a similar plan or the growing importance of teamwork in schools, which is undermined by ranking schemes.

How much better off would schools and companies be if managers and pundits focused as much attention on team building and strategy as they do on the quixotic quest for superstars?

In a wide-ranging interview last week, Susan Szachowicz, the well-respected principal of Brockton High, in Brockton, MA, described how an obsessive focus on literacy and an inclusive teacher-driven approach to improvement, has sustained a decade-long transformation at Brockton, the largest school in the state where most kids are poor, African-American or Latino and many speak a language other than English at home. In 1998—75 percent of Brockton’s students failed the state tests in math and 44 percent failed English. On the most recent tests, in 2011, 87 percent of students passed math and 94 percent passed English.

Indeed, Brockton students do more than just pass. This year 78 percent scored in the top-two out of four categories on the state’s Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) test—Advanced or Proficient—for English Language Arts, and 64 percent scored in the top two categories for math. (Students can pass with a “needs improvement” score.) Close to 90 percent of Brockton’s graduates are college bound, estimates Szachowicz. And, for seven years, Brockton High has been designated a “model school” by the International Center for Leadership in Education.

Brockton’s turnaround began with a crisis. Although the school had long cared more about football than academics, in the 1990s, a new education department policy threatened to withhold diplomas from any student who didn’t pass the state’s MCAS; Brockton faced the possibility that the majority of its students wouldn’t graduate.

In response, a team of high school teachers, led by Szachowicz who was then a history teacher, and, Paul Larino, who has since retired, launched a school-wide multi-disciplinary literacy initiative that focused initially on developing a standard writing curriculum for all classes and retraining all the teachers in the school to teach that curriculum.

A decade later, Brockton is still focused on the same process-obsessed approach to literacy. At a time when school systems are under growing pressure to institute an ever changing array of remedies to improve performance, Brockton has focused single-mindedly on improving its literacy strategy for over 10 years. “This was no fast pirouette,” says Szachowicz who was appointed associate principal for curriculum and instruction in 2000 and became principal three years later. Although the school’s scores began to improve within the first year of the literacy initiative, she adds: “We’ve been working at this for a decade. It’s about doing it systematically and doing it the same way.”

It is about getting everyone at Brockton High to “row in the same direction.”

Kaizen in the Classroom

Though Szachowicz doesn’t think of it in those terms, the strategy that she and Brockton High’s “restructuring committee” launched has many of the hallmarks of Toyota Motor Corp’s kaizen philosophy. Notwithstanding its recent problems with quality and safety, kaizen and the Toyota production system remain one of the most sustained systems-focused approaches to management.

First, Brockton analyzed why its students had trouble learning and decided that “writing was the key to unlocking kids’ thinking,” and thus held the greatest promise for improving learning across all disciplines.

Second, the school tapped the expertise of its teachers to develop a writing process, focusing initially on a 10-step process for writing an “open response”—an assignment that requires students to read a text and to write an essay responding to a question about the text. The benefit of the “open response” assignment was that it crossed “all disciplinary lines” and offered the opportunity for the biggest bump in improvement. No class or teacher would be exempt—not math, not science or gym.

Third, the school has continued to study student performance and introduce new literacy modules to continuously improve the school’s approach to literacy.

Fourth, to implement the system, Brockton developed training modules for its own teachers on how to teach the various literacy processes it has developed.

Fifth, Brockton instituted an evaluation system that was designed to ensure that teachers were teaching the literacy modules, but at the same time, made sure the evaluations were used to improve teaching, not to punish teachers.

“The key to our success was adult learning, not kid learning,” says Szachowicz.

Of course, persuading over 300 teachers in a school that had grown used to failure wasn’t easy. One key to getting the teachers on board was by including them in the decision-making process. The restructuring committee itself included members from almost every discipline. Meeting with small groups of teachers, it created an iterative process whereby it kept going back to the faculty with drafts of the literacy objectives and the skills it expected students to learn. “We kept asking the faculty three questions,” recalls Szachowicz. “One, did we include everything that you think is necessary, and is anything missing. Two, did we state it clearly. Three, what would you change/add.”

Brockton eventually developed a four-part definition of literacy, and a chart of specific literacy skills that had to be posted in every classroom. The school also made sure that the skills were applicable in all content areas. To implement the strategy, Brockton created a strict schedule of literacy assignments that every department was required to follow. The schedule was designed to ensure that over the course of the academic year, the same skills would be repeated over and over in a variety of different disciplines so that students would get the same consistent message about the Brockton writing process in every subject.

The Importance of Adult Learning

Another key to making the process work was teacher training. “I was a history teacher and I used primary source readings all the time, but I didn’t know how to teach reading,” recalls Szachowicz. “What we were onto is if we’re going to ask people to do things differently, we have to show them how.”

The Brockton teacher’s contract allowed for two teacher-meetings per month of one-hour each. The meetings had always been a chore, a time when teachers were reluctantly corralled to listen to announcements that could just as easily have been put into a memo. The restructuring committee got permission from the principal to use the meetings to hash out the literacy strategy and to conduct teacher training. This meant that the training sessions could last no more than an hour. The union was known to file a grievance when the meetings went over by a single minute. Even the one time that the restructuring committee tried to schedule some voluntary meetings, a grievance was filed.

So the restructuring committee developed a step-by-step training module that lasted just under an hour. Teachers would learn the module twice—once as part of an interdisciplinary group and, two weeks later, they would take the same training module, but this time within their respective departments where they could plan ways to integrate content.

Significantly, almost every facet of the literacy strategy was home grown. Just about the only thing for which the literacy committee turned for outside help was in developing an evaluation system. Szachowicz notes that Brockton High’s initiative was highly influenced by Jon Saphier’s Research for Better Teaching, which emphasizes “skillfully and relentlessly” quality monitoring and, in about 2004, hired Saphier’s organization to train administrators in how to evaluate whether the literacy initiative was being properly implemented. Szachowicz estimates that typically the school spent no more than about $35,000 per year on the literacy initiative.

The observations were key to ensuring that teachers were using the process and teaching it on schedule. Equally important, the evaluations were designed to monitor and improve the process, not to punish teachers. After all, for the first time ever, Brockton High was expecting science teachers, math teachers, even gym teachers to teach writing. “They were nervous about doing something they’ve never done before,” says Szachowicz. To make sure that the evaluations were not considered punitive, the school decoupled the literacy observations from teachers’ formal job evaluations.

Still, getting the teachers to buy in was not easy. In the beginning, the majority of teachers were skeptical, but not necessarily negative. But Szachowicz makes it clear that the restructuring committee “didn’t wait for buy in,” she says. If they had “we would still be waiting. We got buy in when we got results.”

Of course, some teachers couldn’t be persuaded. Szachowicz recalls one teacher who covered the mandatory literacy charts in his classroom with posters. When he taught his literacy module he did so with “sarcasm”.

“It was not a good situation, he eventually retired,” says Szachowicz who acknowledges that the restructuring committee cajoled and pressured teachers to follow the program.

The most negative teachers were deliberately grouped together during the literacy brain-storming sessions. Szachowicz estimates that about a dozen teachers left as a direct result of the literacy initiative. It was Brockton’s “good fortune,” says Szachowicz that, in 2004, the state offered an early retirement incentive, which allowed the fence-sitters to “walk out the door”. Some 40 teachers, a little over 10 percent of Brockton High’s workforce, left; though Szachowicz notes that not all the teachers who took early retirement were leaving because of the literacy initiative.

The Great Shakespeare Fiasco

While scores have improved, Szachowicz insists that the school’s literacy initiative is not aimed primarily at improving test-taking. In fact, early on, Brockton did try to gear its literacy program to the test; the effort, which began with an attempt to improve the students’ dismal performance on the portion of the test that during the previous three years had required them to interpret a Shakespeare sonnet, became known as the Great Shakespeare Fiasco. For an entire school year, Brockton teachers force-fed sonnets to their students, only to find that the next state test didn’t include any sonnets. “This cannot be about what’s on the test,” insists Szachowicz. “It has to be about what kids need to know, about their thinking routines.”

Brockton High also has benefited from consistent leadership. In 1998, shortly after the literacy initiative was first initiated, Eugene Marrow, a gym teacher and former football coach became principal of Brockton High. Although he was “not a curriculum guy, he believed in improvement,” says Szachowicz who credits Marrow, an African-American who grew up in Brockton and had “high expectations” of kids, for supporting the programming and helping to win over many teachers. “It was important that he was not an outsider,” says Szachowicz.

During the course of more than a decade since Szachowicz has guided Brockton High’s literacy strategy, she has worked for three superintendents. The first, Joe Bage, was “a rock,” says Szachowicz, who backed the literacy strategy “100 percent.” Bage’s successor let her continue with the program. Now Brockton has its third superintendent since the start of the literacy initiative.

Alluding to Isaiah Berlin’s essay, The Fox and the Hedgehog—“The fox knows many little things. The hedgehog knows one big thing.”–Szachowicz calls herself a hedgehog: Whatever anyone throws her way, she keeps her focus on just one thing: “literacy, literacy, literacy.” But the program is constantly being updated and improved. Most recently, the school worked on developing teaching modules to improve how kids read and analyze visuals, such as graphs and charts.

The other thing that hasn’t changed at Brockton is a commitment to teacher involvement. Periodically, Brockton High holds teacher meetings that follow a “world café” format. The sessions are designed to brainstorm ideas and to develop a dialogue among Brockton High’s teaching staff, many of whom don’t know each other. This semester, the school is using the process to develop new policies and ideas for one of the most hot-button issues in education: its use of digital technology and electronic devices.

“I am not authorized to accept your car,” explained the courteous young rental agent when I arrived at National’s East 80^th Street location at about 5 p.m. on Monday afternoon. “You will have to drive the car to the airport.” The agent, who gave her name as Jay Givens, explained that in the aftermath of the storm and a large volume of rental cars returning to New York—often the only way travelers had of getting back from airports up and down the East Coast to which flights had been diverted in the aftermath of the storm–National didn’t have room in its garage. However, she reassured me, National would be happy to pay for my cab fare from the airport back to Manhattan.

Struggling to maintain my temper, I said that I did not have time to drive to the airport—this was rush hour, I might add–and that I wanted to speak to the manager. Ms. Givens readily obliged and it became clear from her brief exchange with the manager that I was not the first customer who had been asked to perform car-delivery services for National that afternoon.

I was ready to tell the manager that he might want to arrange for one of his employees to drive excess vehicles to the airport, or to lease space in one of the numerous neighborhood garages. Perhaps some customers would be willing to drive to the airport in exchange for a meaningful discount off of the hefty rental prices that National charges, especially for cars that are dropped off at a different location from where the rentals originate; in my case, I paid over $200, about double the cost of a one-day rental, for the privilege of dropping the car off in Manhattan.

But before I could say any of that, the manager sighed audibly and said: “Go ahead, leave the car. I’ll probably get fired. But just leave it.”

Fired? Ms. Givens, a picture of calm and courtesy throughout this exchange, nodded and explained that it was National management that had issued the edict to turn away customers who were trying to return cars in Manhattan.

Just then, a harried young man raced into the office. He too wanted to return his rental car. But unlike me, he wanted to leave his car at the airport so that, after a grueling drive from North Carolina, where his flight had been diverted, he could catch a connection home to Germany from JFK. Only, in his case, the company wouldn’t allow him to return the car to the airport. You see, the German tourist had rented a car from Alamo, National’s sister car-rental company. Almost all National rental locations also rent Alamo cars—but not the one at JFK. And even though the East 80^th Street station was filled to capacity, the company wouldn’t allow him to drop his car at JFK.

I left the National office shaking my head. Many companies—like Walmart, which organized a rapid-response flotilla of supplies to New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina—realize that disasters are an opportunity to burnish their image and win customer loyalty. But disasters also test management systems. Judging from what I experienced, it’s a test that National Car Rental and its parent Enterprise Holdings, which bills itself as the world’s largest car rental company and one that aims to “exceed” customer expectations, failed this week. The one thing the company has going for it are employees who want to do the right thing. Their fear of reprisals, though, is another indicator of lousy management.

On a cold windy morning last spring, 22 educators from as far away as Kentucky stepped into a math class room at I.S. 228, a middle school in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn, to view a 21^st century version of EMERAC. They stopped in front of four large computer screens that resemble airport monitors. But instead of flights and gates, the screens listed the names of some 150 seventh graders who were working in small groups or individually, most seated in front of laptops. At either end of the long narrow room, four teachers taught live lessons to groups of five to ten students each. .

Joel Rose, a boyish looking former fifth-grade math teacher who once worked in human resources at the New York City Dept. of Education, raised his voice so he could be heard above the airport-like din: “The idea that one teacher can possibly personalize learning given the variability in an individual classroom is a myth. We know that some do it better than others. Even when we get a great teacher, this job is just too hard.”

Last year, I.S. 288, which got a “C” on its 2010 progress report, was one of three schools that turned its math program over to Rose’s brainchild, the School of One, a much ballyhooed experiment that is being funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Cisco, among others.

A computer algorithm determines almost everything that happens in I.S. 228’s 90-minute math classes. The school year begins with a detailed evaluation of each student—his hobbies, social life and academic performance. “If a kid says he likes technology, and mom says he likes technology, and teacher says he likes technology, let’s start off with the assumption that using technology might be an effective modality with this kid,” says Rose.

The computer generates a personalized “playlist” of a dozen-or-so target skills covering a year’s worth of study that could include remedial or advanced subjects, depending on a child’s needs. Each day the algorithm updates the playlist, based on what he has learned, and generates his next day’s schedule. No two kids get the same playlist.

“A kid shows up in the morning, looks up at the monitor,” explains Rose. “He sees that he’s working with Mr. Smith on the area of a triangle during his first period. Then, he’ll work with software on area of the triangle. At the end of the day he takes an assessment. If he does well, he moves on.” If not, it’s back to the area of the triangle, only in a collaborative activity or maybe with a virtual tutor.

Ann Wiener, one of the visitors, is a former principal who now coaches principals for the New York City Leadership Academy. Wiener noticed that every child she spoke to liked something about the program: “One kid liked the virtual teacher; but didn’t like that she didn’t get the same virtual teacher each time,” said Wiener. “Another liked the small teacher-led groups—though he didn’t like all the teachers.”

“Sometimes it’s good to work independently,” said a girl named Anika who was working on a math program on her laptop and described herself as a strong student.

A boy named Justin who also had been assigned to work independently on the computer groused: “A live teacher will explain things better.”

At another table, a small-group collaboration station, three boys huddled over a single computer screen that looked suspiciously like a Facebook page; when a visitor peered over their shoulders, three hands shot up and slammed the laptop shut. None of the teachers noticed a thing.

About eight adults work in each of two School-of-One classrooms at any given time–about half of them student teachers. That makes the ratio of certified teachers to students about 1 to 36; but, because most students are working on computers, the teacher-to-student ratio for live instruction is much smaller.

The teachers’ days also are programmed by the algorithm. Every afternoon, after the computer evaluates the daily quizzes and updates each student’s playlist, it generates the teachers’ schedules. The teachers are welcome to design their own lessons, or they can select from the hundreds of lessons on the School of One portal.

The key, says Rose, is getting teachers to act like surgeons—specialists who hone a handful of math skills that they repeat over and over. “We want teachers to do the hardest part of the job: deliver great live instruction, and check on overall student learning,” says Rose. “Everything else can be done by other adults and technology.”

“If we have kids working on computers, maybe we don’t need fully certified teachers walking around the room going ‘good job.’ Or checking on the internet connection.”

One visitor asked whether shuffling kids among modalities and instructors means that they never have a chance to develop a close relationship with a teacher. “That’s true,” replied Rose. “But, then in the old days, if a kid didn’t like his math teacher, he was hosed.”

“I’ve heard that teachers hate it,” said another visitor referring to the algorithm. “That it turns them into automotons.”

“Our survey results say the opposite,” says Rose. “The vast majority prefer teaching in School of One.”

Unlike EMERAC, which was eventually overwhelmed by the data it was fed, the learning algorithm gets more powerful every day. “We can now tell a publisher that lesson 13 on fractions is terrific, but lesson 16 on decimals stinks,” says Rose, who wants to use an itunes model to select only the best lessons from publishers, rather than buying entire text books.

The algorithm also provides feedback about the strengths and weaknesses of individual teachers.

Rose is most excited about what School of One does for live classroom instruction. “Let’s be honest,” says Rose. “At most schools the teacher shuts her door and you don’t know what’s happening in there. Some teachers prepare for five hours, some for five minutes.”

With the custom-designed open-space plan, teaching becomes “more transparent,” says Rose, recounting a favorite anecdote about a teacher who, on a snowy day when half the class stayed home, suggested showing a video. “What are you kidding?” responded her colleague.

Rose, bouncing on the balls of his feet, says: “That’s the kind of collective accountability we’re trying to achieve.”

A recent study by the NYC DOE’s Research and Policy Study Group found that, in its first year of operation as a pilot program, School of One students learned at a rate 50 to 60 percent higher than those in traditional classrooms.

School of One planned to double in size in the 2011/2012 school year. But in March, shortly after giving the I.S. 228 tour, Rose resigned saying that continuing School-of-One-style innovations “can best be accomplished through the sustained efforts of an independent organization with a national scope,” and NYC DOE has put off the expansion, citing budget constraints. The program will continue in the original three schools with News Corp.’s Wireless Generationproviding technology “leadership.” Jonathan Werle, a DOE vice- chancellor, serves as Project Manager. And the NYC DOE retains control over the School of One brand.

It is unclear what will become of a research project at NYU, which was to study eight new schools selected by Rose. Four were to get the School-of-One treatment; the others a placebo. A preliminary study by NYU researchers of School of One’s impact on middle school math achievement is expected in October—though, as the researchers note, “the first year of school-wide implementation is too early to make definitive claims.”

Back in the hallway at I.S. 228 one of the teachers explained why School of One is “a win win win” for everybody: “It’s much better for the teachers,” said the teacher, grey-haired and sporting a faux gold chain with a bejeweled Texas-star pendant over his suit jacket and tie. “The computer does everything. It generates the lessons, the tests and it grades the tests. Plus, most of the time the computer is giving the instruction. From the teacher’s point of view there’s no negative to it. Kids like it ‘cause it’s fancy. And from the administration’s point of view, it’s great. They get to save on salaries.”

Some of the Abrams’s fun observations: Women are better investors–i.e. they garner better long-term results–because they are more measured, less impulsive. Women are better legislators; and legislatures that have a preponderance of women are also less corrupt. Women wash their hands more often after using the bathroom. And 82 percent of the people struck by lightning are men because they tend to stay out on the golf course, and on the roof, even after the storm clouds have gathered.

One thing men are better at: Taking risks. Rep. Anthony Wiener are you paying attention?