In one of his appearances, the late Steve Jobs described what he termed, the “10-80-10” rule of leadership. The rule is a leadership principle that prescribes where effective leaders should spend their time:
- 10% of the time should be spent communicating your vision for “the thing.”
- 80% of the time should be spent moving the “the thing” forward.
- 10% of the time polishing the thin, and helping others to understand why and how you are tweaking “the thing.”
“THE THING” in this leadership principle is any product or outcome the organization is set up to create. Applied to schools “the thing” or “things,” are listed in school mission statements. Popular things listed in these documents are as follows:
- “Well prepared for college and a career path”
- “Life-long learner”
- “Productive global citizen”
- “Learn to think critically and deeply”
- “Develop diverse skills, talents, interests, and abilities”
- “Nurture each child’s curiosity”
The obstacle that school leaders run into when trying to emulate the 10-80-10 rule is school offices that fail to address the first 10% rule: “10% of the time should be spent communicating a vision of schooling.” Yes, most schools do write a mission statement; and, yes, the mission statements are a mixture of many worthwhile educational goals. The schools I led, however, were designed around two conflicting purposes for schooling. The first reason, which was articulated in school mission statements, was to create critical thinkers or to put it another way, thinkers that would distance themselves from conventional wisdom.
The second reason, the reason that schools were designed to implement, and which school communities supported with their tax dollars, was the goal of socialization: accept the world as, with all of its rules, requirements, and constraints. The school facility, along with the organization of curriculum and instruction, established a schooling regime, founded on standardization, conformity, regulation, credentialing, accreditation, and accounting. There was little space in our school where mission-driven goals—love of learning, democratic participation, asking challenging questions—were valued or promoted.
Numerous surveys of student attitudes towards schooling have reported student discontent with a school organization and curriculum that values a grammar of schooling grounded in memorization, recitation, and quantitative measures of what has been memorized and recited on a test. Each of these values establishes an instructional regime that endorses the following principles of teaching and learning:
- All knowledge is fixed and resides in a textbook
- Teachers are truth-tellers
- Practice makes perfect
- Points are deducted for incorrect answers
- Facts first/meaning later
- Timed tests indicate speed and learning
- Abstractions describe reality
I could on, but, will stop here to point out that each of these principles, and many more I could list, have no basis in the research, and, create learning environments that are antithetical to engaging the minds of children and adolescents. I will not go into detailed refutations of the reach learning principle. Suffice it to say that an instructional regime founded on fixed knowledge, accumulation of facts, repetition, correctness, and replication, not only distorts the educational values written into school mission statements but turns the remaining elements of Jobs rule of leadership into a problem of engineering rather than enacting.
The distinction between both processes—engineering and enacting—is how school administrators respond to student dissatisfaction with the grammar of schooling. Typical indicators of student dissatisfaction with the grammar of schooling are low test scores, poor attendance, high drop-out rates, and high disciplinary violations. When questioned on these quantitative indicators of low student engagement, school administrators offer an engineering fix: lower class size, hire more support staff, lengthen periods, adopt a program, and drop electives. Rarely in these conversations do administrators return to Jobs first 10%—their vision of schooling, and whether that vision— mission-driven values and goals—is being realized in classrooms that surround their school offices. Instead, they proceed to tinker with an engineering solution—the other 80%/10%—with little or no effect on schools that for most students (74% in a recent survey) feel like a prison.
Schools intent on living up to their school’s mission statement must return to Jobs first 10%—the purpose of schooling or more broadly what it means to be educated. Presently, the purpose of schooling has been reduced to institutional goals: replicate on a test what a teacher tells a class or what is assigned in a textbook. The alternative model of schooling, one which John Dewey and a group of progressive educators pursued at the turn of the century classrooms where students are asked: to see relationships; reexamine practices, habits, assumptions, and biases; to decide how to live their life; to challenge the final vocabularies of their parents.
Dewey’s model of schooling or what it means to be educated, would require a complete redesign of the structure of schooling and teaching methodologies to restore agency to student learning. I will not go into the particulars of what these classrooms would look like—well, in fact, there would be no classrooms per se—but the remaining Jobs 80%/10% rule would be devoted to moving the “thing” forward, the thing being learning environments that encourage students to think about what they know, what they care about, and what they want to know more about.
Alan C. Jones 