The average C.E.O makes an astronomical 262 times more than the average American. As a second year teacher in the Bronx earning approximately $43,000 a year, there seems to be an obvious discrepancy in the nation’s priorities and pay scale. Your typical C.E.O has a multitude of responsibilities, focusing on the short-term appeasement of shareholders, capturing and enhancing market share, motivating employees, handling the management of individuals, and orchestrating the day-to-day operations of the company. Just a year and a half out of college, and to some extent I feel like I am already doing that on a daily basis in the classroom.
As a teacher, you are C.E.O of your classroom, one thing that I certainly took for granted as I considered teaching in the South Bronx. On a daily basis, you conduct the operations of your classroom, tweaking systems and procedures to insure efficiency and pay dividends in the form of additional learning time. Time is money, both figuratively and literally in the classroom, as each precious second could harvest the budding careers of America’s future leaders. In addition, each cherished moment could push my students, which on average are already two years behind, further into the abyss of educational deficit.
In the classroom, decisions must be calculated with an ever vigilant eye to the future. At times, some systems and motivational techniques may feel like two steps forward accompanied by one gigantic step back, essentially negating any ground made. This was how I felt when I first implemented allotted class time towards independent reading in order to increase students’ reading stamina, grow reading levels, and augment their own personal joy and satisfaction of reading. As the entire class struggled to go beyond a simple twelve minute threshold of sustained, silent, active, reading, I began to second guess this decision. Was it really worth taking class time away from learning for silent reading? Many of my sixth graders were reading on a fourth grade level; was this actually helping them catch up? Was this the most productive use of time for students that were already behind? Like business earnings reports, I measured students on a quarterly basis, finding progress was being made. In the end, students reaped huge dividends by this simple system, averaging over 2 years of growth in reading. As a teacher, you must perform your own daily cost-benefit analysis of what to teach, which students to focus on, and where to use your own scarce resources.
However, teachers bear no responsibility to stockholders. Sadly, many people probably would not gamble on students receiving a public education in the South Bronx. As C.E.O of the classroom, you do have a massive duty to the shareholders of education, your students, and their parents/guardians. These are the people who rely on you daily to come to work with the passion to lead, creativity to excite, and ability to inspire. Students and their parents/guardians’ futures are on the line, as their actions in the classroom, and your ability to manage, lead, and develop a plan will impact their future for better or worse. Your decisions affect much more than you, they are a concentric circle affecting your school, fellow teachers and administrators, those you teach, and their families.
To take this analogy further, students play the dual role of being shareholders as well as employees by holding stock in their education. Every company, no matter how well run, has it’s prodigies and those who plod through work. Jack Welch, the renown former C.E.O of General Electric, had a management style that was ostensibly candid, open, and methodical in its approach to company issues, utilizing a rule known as 20-70-10. In a nutshell, the rule essentially was a way of organizing your company, or in our case, our classrooms, to maximize productivity. The top 20% receive a great deal of recognition, additional responsibilities or promotions, compensation and bonuses to reward them for their above average contributions. In your classroom, your top 20% should be the students and leaders that the remaining 80% strive to be. They are your Managing Directors in a sense, troubleshooting, and demonstrating how effective your strategies are working. In order to retain their effort, extrinsic motivation such as minor bonuses can stimulate educational capital.
The next 70% are your middle students. In Welch’s plan, these are people who are rough around the edges, but offer a variety of skills capable of being sharpened. They are your students who have a great deal of potential, but may need that extra push, or motivation to move them closer, or even into the top 20%. Finally, your bottom 10% are your deadweights in the business sense, and should be cut from the company. As a teacher, we would be betraying our profession and most certainly being a disservice to these students by giving up on them. Your bottom 10% in the classroom require individualized strategies, incentive plans, and perhaps pairing 2-1 with your top 20% to push them forward. Just as a C.E.O, this opens you to a value judgment, the trade-off and risk of lowering the performance of your top 20% in an effort to right the bottom 10%.
Businesses utilize something that many teachers indirectly or unintentionally implement in their classroom known as Six Sigma. In its essence, Six Sigma is based upon consistency and limiting variation. For example, companies may say that when something is shipped it will arrive in 7-10 business days. If the shipment arrives just 2 days after the first time something is ordered, and the 12th day the next, this averages 7 days. However, the variation leads to inconsistent expectations. It would be better to try to stay within the predetermined 7-10 day range. When routines are established in class such as: (1) you will be notified 2 days before there is a quiz, or (2) homework will be returned corrected the next day, (3) quizzes will be returned no later than three days after they were taken, these established procedures enable confidence in the leadership when they are performed. It constantly affirms and reinforces the leader’s ability to stay on task, and that type of message can be carried from the top down. Moreover, in terms of behavior, if consequences and incentives are handled haphazardly than this facilitates a fundamental sense of mistrust and unfairness in the systems. If students cannot buy into the system, just as customers cannot trust the variables of a company not operating under Six Sigma, this naturally leads to wariness and uncertainty in the culture of the company/classroom and confidence in its manager.
In order to move your students forward, just like C.E.O’s must seek to get the most out of their workers, teachers must create rigid “compensation” and punishment policies. Incentivizing performance could be the mitigating factor that pushes those 20% further, which enable those mediocre 70% to become above average students, and those at the bottom to find a new-found confidence and encouragement. The teacher’s ability to manage, motivate, and inspire will be reflected in your students’ educational achievements, their profit margin. In the end, teachers and C.E.O’s must make snap decisions that influences the lives of others. The learning curve is steep with every misstep and revelation resonating on the hundreds of people who rely on their evaluations.
Teaching is a business. Everyday our actions are tiny fibers and webs connecting school, students, family, and future. A simple sick day can not only hamper student productivity in one subject, it can destroy an entire day for your class. C.E.O’s do not take sick days for this very reason, because they are so vital to the company, a day could cost the company billions in lost productivity. Even though the parallels are far from perfect, the bottom line firs is that the fate of teachers and students, like C.E.O’s and their company, are intimately intertwined. Both teachers and C.E.O’s utilize similar skills in directing the actions of their company/classroom. Furthermore, both work long hours, putting in time long after that last bell has rung. As C.E.O’s utilize similar skills and reap the benefits of earning more in one day than some teachers earn in a year, we enjoy the spoils of having fourteen weeks of vacation. We also get the chance to see our decisions, strategies, and ideas affect our students in a myriad of ways now, and in the future. For both positions the stakes and rewards are high. In order to succeed, one must be able to read your personnel, anticipate, creatively utilize your own resources, and implement evolving techniques to move your company/classroom forward.
–Evan Piekara
