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Since he took over as chief executive of Italy's Fiat in 2004, the chain-smoking Canadian Italian has used Apple as a model, focusing on the way Steve Jobs transformed it from an also-ran computer company into a global icon of cool. He encourages Fiat managers to take a close look at Apple's branding prowess and even asks them to benchmark their activities against the company. His biggest success at Fiat is the 500--a tiny, very cool 21st century version of a 52-year-old Italian icon once driven by movie stars such as Marcello Mastroianni...
...move to Canada and for a while lived just across the river from Detroit, is not a micromanager. He declined to be interviewed, but in a first-person account of the Fiat turnaround published in Harvard Business Review, he talked about how he had abandoned the "Great Man model of leadership" that long characterized the Italian firm. Fiat's Great Man was the late Gianni Agnelli, grandson of founder Giovanni, whose family was nothing short of Italian industrial royalty and still controls the firm...
That was three summers ago. Fast-forward to last Monday, when Zitzner was in the audience in Washington as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appealed to a gathering of charter-school operators to "adapt your educational model to turning around our lowest-performing schools." For months now, Duncan has talked about closing 5,000 - or about 5% - of the nation's lowest-performing public schools. By throwing down the gauntlet to charter schools, Duncan is challenging an industry that has become very proficient at opening up brand-new schools, but has very little experience in going into a preexisting school...
...turnaround model could be a road to greater growth for the charter-school movement which, after 16 years, comprises 1.4 million students in 4,600 schools - still only about 4% of all public schools. Charters, which are funded with public dollars but are typically free of school-district and teacher-union restrictions, have typically been regarded as labs of innovation (though a recent Stanford University study makes the case that charter-school quality can range greatly, from great to not so great). Many charter principals have full control over the hiring and firing of teachers, full control of what curriculum...
...some see the turnaround model as a mostly hypothetical solution that has yet to provide results. "It's the audacity of hope in the extreme," says Mike Petrilli, who analyzes education programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank. "There are very few examples in the country where we've been able to turn around failing schools. And those are just a handful. To go from a few dozen schools to 5,000 is quite audacious. It's not very clear how we're going to get from here to there...