University of Chicago Prof. Charles Payne spoke recently on the subject of his book So Much Reform, So Little Change. The prospect of some raw truth about the current state of American education got me out to Central High in Providence on a Saturday morning.

The last time I wrote about Central High, by the way, was to observe that its building, especially the bathrooms, screamed “You don’t matter” to the kids. But in a nice irony, the refurbished Central High is now looking fixed up and downright spiffy.

So things do change. If only externals. Or if in matters more substantive, only in pockets here and there. An engaging speaker, Payne had an impressive list of improvements in certain tough urban systems. Chicago reduced the number of kids who were reading in the bottom quartile by 45 percent. Boston doubled the number of kids meeting state testing standards. Newark reduced its dropout rate by 20 percent. And there were more.

Payne said, “I could not have stood here in 1995 and said that. It used to be nothing for an urban teacher to read a [news]paper in front of a class. There were principals who never left their offices in laissez-faire schools.”

However, he says, we’ve spent “billions and billions of dollars, and yet have so little to show in urban reform. So little lasts. And the thing I’m most concerned about is that we can’t solve the problem because we can’t even see it.”

Desperate educators and community advocates often ask him what ideas would help their schools. “But there is no program or package. And that way of thinking has dominated our thinking for the last decade.”

We’ve worked on big ideas like: Make teachers have higher expectations of the kids. Bring in corporate leaders to show our ineffective principals how to lead. Teach poor people to value education. Get charter schools. Break the unions. Bust the big schools into smaller “learning communities.” And many more.

Mind you, he all but shouts that everything mentioned above is important. “All of it matters!”

Okay, if it all matters and we’ve tried it all, why have we made so little progress?

“Because you have institutions in which the adults fail to cooperate. Grown-up people unable to work together bedevils the system from bottom to top.”

Yes! Payne is so on to something.

He says, “All decisions are politicized. Failure is valorized. Sit in a teachers lounge and listen to them compete with one another about how much their kids are failing.” When districts actually get good leadership, they chew him up, they buy her out. Payne cites Rudy Crew’s excellent record in Miami and his ignominious departure as only the most recent example.

Last year, New York City won the Broad prize for the most improved urban school system, in part because they’d reduced the dropout rate 8 to 10 percent. When asked about their biggest obstacles to success, Payne reports, “Administration said the most difficult problem was to get the Board of Education to talk to the other people on the Board of Education. Every department head had become a fiefdom with its own agenda and rules. It was not about instruction or teachers. It was about getting the leadership, at all levels, just to talk to each other.”

Payne’s research shows that if two failing schools have the same demographics and the same externals, the one poised to improve is the one with teamwork among the teachers, and a proactive principal, and kids who feel valued the moment they walk in the door. “The best predictor of a [school that will turn itself around] is whether people say they trust their colleagues.”

If you’re curious which Rhode Island schools have strong collegiality, log onto Information Works ( www.infoworks.ride.uri.edu) and look at each school’s “Connectedness” chart. Rhode Island’s annual survey asks whether teachers feel there is a “group spirit” in their building. The resulting data reveals some buildings to be so embattled you wonder how adults manage to get themselves to go to work in the morning. And the kids are not stupid. They know when the grown-ups are fighting. They learn from the tensions. Monkey see; monkey do. If you need to get your way, do as we do: fight.

As Payne says, “Even if you have all the political leaders and administrators lined up [and agreeing], a group of maverick teachers can bring you down.”

Given that Payne’s analysis seems dead on the money, he was surprisingly dismissive of charter schools. True, charters educate a fairly small proportion of the nation’s kids — about 3 percent, a drop in the bucket. But the 95 percent of charters that survive, thrive precisely because the grown-ups are in it together. Charters have strong incentive to pull together because if the adults start to pull apart, the school dies.

True, Payne is after far bigger fish than one little school at a time. He focuses on big-city district administration. But the central relationship at the heart of public-school districts, big and small, is the structurally adversarial relationship between labor and management. Historically, labor-management stances often erupt into war-like conditions with strikes and the ugly work-to-the-rule labor actions hurtful to children. When school or district grown-ups battle among themselves about who’s entitled to limited, tax-generated resources, students don’t matter.

Payne’s central message is right. Embattled adults constantly undermine improvement in American schools. They’re like the basketball game that erupts into a brawl, leaving the ball to roll off the court. Payne’s thesis implies that the whole paradigm of adversarial labor-management relations puts American public education on untenably shaky ground. And like it or not, the family-like relationships fostered by charter schools do provide an alternative model.

Now the question is how to provide big-city schools and their central offices with incentives that encourage everyone, especially the teachers on the front lines, to solve their conflicts with the same cooperation and intelligence we hope the kids will learn. In the same spirit we wish all families could operate. The working relationship central to public schools needs to become: “I’ve got your back, and we are definitely on the same team. But we disagree strongly and need to work out a solution we can all live with. Let’s roll up our sleeves. Let’s show the kids how adults handle really tough problems.”

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@cox.net , or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.