Doing Less with Less
I read through dozens of headlines and a handful of news articles on education every day. During the last several months, I have seen a lot of articles on budget concerns and higher than normal employee turnover. Our conversations with educators around the country often center around the resulting pains associated with resource constraints.
All the news and conversations remind me of a piece of advice an Army Lieutenant General (3 Star) gave me several years ago when I asked for tips on leadership. “I’ve experienced a lot of budget cuts and resource challenges during my career,” he said. “The guidance I received from my senior officers in these circumstances was always the same. ‘You need to learn how to do more with less,’ they told me. I reject that idea. Great leaders need to do less with less.”
I have reflected on and put the general’s advice to use many times throughout the years and have always found the notion of doing less with less to be a critical ingredient in the efficiency equation.
Why does efficiency matter for educators?
In a previous article, I wrote that “operational efficiency is all about achieving output objectives with the fewest input resources possible, or alternatively maximizing the output achieved on a given set of inputs.” In education, this means that districts are efficient when they use their fixed budget to maximize student achievement in preparation for global competitiveness. Efficiency is a worthy imperative for every organization, but especially for organizations funded by the public purse and tasked with educating our posterity. I can’t think of any other investment where it is more critical to get the best bang for the buck.
What about quality?
The most common efficiency metric I see in the education space is student-to-teacher ratio, and less often administrator-to-teacher or administrator-to-student ratios. As the thought goes, reducing these ratios leads to better education… but is completely contrary to the principles of efficiency. Note, however, that reducing ratios is a strategy for improving quality, not efficiency. But what if quality improvements could be achieved without additional resource requirements? What if, in fact, educators could concurrently reduce resource requirements and increase quality? This is at the very core of doing less with less.
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But first, consider the following:
Our community must be mindful of the adage that correlation does not imply causation.
Lower ratios may be correlated to better education quality, but the causal factor is actually the increased and more personalized attention students receive from skilled teachers and other interactive staff members (i.e. guidance counselors).
There are a lot of mechanisms beyond reducing ratios that allow teachers to spend more of their time preparing for and delivering high-impact and personalized education.
How to Do Less With Less
“When you stop doing the things that make you feel busy but aren’t getting you the results (and draining you of energy), then you end up with more than enough time for what matters and a sense of peace and speciousness that constant activity has kept outside your reach.” -Kate Northrup, Harvard Business Review
Step 1: Create a time journal to track how you spend your work hours. Take note of the time spent doing things you love and things that have the greatest impact on the goal to provide quality education for students in your class, school, or district.
Step 2: Be brutally honest with yourself… is there anything on this list that you could stop doing that would have little to no impact on your effectiveness as an educator? If it is within your power to decide on your own, stop doing those things immediately. Otherwise, bring this list to the attention of your supervisor along with suggestions on mitigating any adverse impacts associated with stopping those activities. Remember to be part of the solution and not just the messenger of the problems.
Step 3: Identify tasks that might benefit from delegation, collaboration, or technology (or a combination). Remember, many hands make light work.
Example: I recently spoke with a seasoned elementary school teacher who had many years of experience teaching third grade but was asked to teach fourth grade this year. He shared the frustrations associated with spending his summer studying fourth grade academic standards and creating a teaching schedule and lesson plans for his new assignment. Even with that initial time investment, he said he now spends an hour each day doing foundational curriculum work. This is in a well-run district with 60 elementary schools and more than 200 fourth grade classes. I’m sure this teacher could have saved hundreds of hours and ended up with a better quality first year as a fourth-grade teacher with technology-enhanced collaboration across his fourth-grade peer teacher group.
Now, consider that 16% of teachers turn over every year1 (before COVID), meaning that this district could be saving 3,200 hours of curriculum management time among their fourth-grade teachers and 19,200 labor hours among their elementary school teachers. That is a lot of hours that could have been spent tailoring lesson plans to unique needs. Also, it is a lot of money spent doing something that could be done smarter (19.2K hours = 9 FTEs @ $55K salary + 25% in taxes and benefits = a conservative estimate of $660K spent at the district).
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Step 4: Identify opportunities for prioritization
Have you ever seen the Steven Covey video on Big Rocks - the one where a woman is given rocks of various sizes (representing life priorities) and asked to fit them all into a single bucket? The winning strategy is to place all the big rocks (most important priorities) into the bucket first, and then to sift in the small rocks – which easily fill in the cracks between the big rocks.
I don’t know about you, but my truth is I can never fit all my rocks into the bucket. No matter how good I am at prioritizing, I still can’t get to it all. But at least I can sleep well knowing I addressed my top and many of the lesser priorities. In those cases when I’m not able to address my top priorities, I often go back to step three and figure out how I can work smarter or even back to step 2 to reassess where I’m wasting time.
A Final Note for Education Leaders
Doing less with less is all about managing resource constraints by prioritizing and making smart tradeoffs. However, there are also social-emotional challenges associated with letting go of expectations tied to lower-priority tasks or tasks that can more efficiently be accomplished through teamwork or technology. This is one of the major reasons why we sometimes choose to do things the way they have always been done, even when a better path is staring at us straight in the face. Change is uncomfortable, but it is also the only constant in life, and it is at the very core of educating students. I think we can all take the student approach when it comes to accepting the challenge to do less with less.
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Afterword: 5 Related Inspirational Quotes
- “You must be willing to give up what you are to become what you want to be.” – Orrin Woodward
- “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” Mahatma Gandhi
- “Be like the flower, survive the rain but use it to grow.” -Unknown
- “The most dangerous phrase in the language is ‘We’ve always done it this way.’” – Grace Hopper
- “Sometimes doing less is more than enough.” – Chris Carr
