Each spring, Tom Payzant, outgoing superintendent of Boston schools, would sift through his city's mountain of education data to identify the three or four most-underperforming schools. He would spend the next school year working directly with them.

Most remarkably, he would sit on each school's school-improvement team or Site-based Council, the group that manages the school's long-term and everyday issues. Managing a school as a team is often frustrating and plodding work, but decisions made by and at the school are most responsive to the specific population of kids in each building. As such, the improvements Payzant and these teams made were incremental and unflashy. But now the nation's eyes are turned toward Boston as a model urban district whose schools are making steady progress.

Ultimately, school principals are responsible for managing personnel, budgets, academic strategies and such, but they should never work alone. A school-improvement team provides the principal with a kitchen cabinet of teachers, parents and, ideally, someone representing a community partner, such as a local business or hospital. It is up to this group to consult the rest of the school community and then decide, for example, how to shore up the school's academic program. Should they get a math consultant, some professional development in writing, perhaps a new textbook? If the school has had a sudden spate of bullying, plagiarism, graffiti or unusually high absenteeism, the improvement team must get to the bottom of what's going on. They oversee subgroups charged with hiring staff or investigating the pros and cons of block scheduling.

The team is, in effect, the school's board of directors. Effective teams collect information, talk about important matters and face, head on, problems such as disappointing test scores. They have the guts, creativity and credibility to persuade the school community to make tough changes. Bad teams wallow in blame, complaint and naysaying.

During his 11-year tenure, Payzant handed over more and more power and responsibility to school communities, via these governance teams. Schools that can solve their own problems are schools that can improve how they care for and teach the kids. They deserve the attention Payzant gave them.

Far too often school reformers, even superintendents, develop school-improvement strategies without being grounded in the personalities, issues and unforeseeable quirks of a real school. Too often school leaders gather for conferences or professional development to hear organizational experts insist on thinking at the "30,000-foot level." As Big Thinkers, they don't want to get tangled in the trivia or anecdotes of the real life of a school. But these 30,000-foot ideas play out very differently than originally imagined when implemented among a faculty who has no faith in the idea, with children who need something else, in a school community sick of being told what to do.

Payzant's approach to improving all the schools in his district was analogous to how a good parent raises children, helping each one have the best information, skills, good sense and sound judgment to be independent and high-performing. He wasn't looking for a system of schools stamped with the Payzant logo, but a portfolio of subtly unique organizations he could trust with the kids entrusted to them. Payzant continually wrestled decision-making power from external forcessuch as contracts, state legislation and regulations and gave it to the schools. He charged his central office to support schools, not dictate to them. He empowered the frontlines.

As Payzant said more than once, in an interview I had with him last winter, "I need ordinary people doing extraordinary things." Ideally the improvement team, and by extension the school, can work at peak performance without superstars or saints.

Last year, Rhode Island's General Assembly passed a law mandating that all schools have improvement teams. Wouldn't it be lovely if we could just pass a law and have a terrific board of school directors? Unfortunately, in most Rhode Island schools the teams are largely window dressing with little decision-making power. They can't control hiring or staff transfer, or keep the money they save for initiatives of their choosing, or be creative about scheduling. As a result, Rhode Island schools are generally struggling badly or not performing as well as they could.

If a school staff make their own decisions, using their best judgment, they'll own the results of those decisions. They'll consider what they do carefully. If their strategy fails, they have no choice but to come back together and hash out why. A robust, well-intentioned failure offers a lot of rich lessons. And out of such failures fabulous innovations sometimes emerge.

But if schools don't own their decisions, their failures are someone else's fault or problem. If they're just implementing mandates by the central office, labor contracts or the Regents, it's no big surprise when going through the motions doesn't work. If they have no power to do things their way, they'll never own the academic results, never mind the kids.

In an interview with The New York Daily News, New York City School Chancellor Joel Klein said, "If you think about the history of public education in the last 40 years in the United States, it has been fundamentally a journey to regulate schools into success. Now it's time to really increase the authority of the people at the school level."

It's a simple idea. Invest a management team with actual power, responsibility, resources and trust. Get the decision making down from the 30,000-foot thinking. And by all means, get it away from the politicians and labor leaders who are not involved in the daily lives of kids and schools.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she now consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny@cox.net or c/o EdWatch, Education and Employment, Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.