A quote attributed to Peter Drucker says it all: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” No matter how strong your strategy, what ultimately determines the success or failure of your efforts will be determined by your school culture.
On the surface, it may seem as though schools have a wide range of cultures, from highly demanding ones focused on academic success to cultures that target students’ personal growth and development. However, after working with thousands of schools over the last 20 years, I’ve found there are only three types of school cultures—toxic cultures, “good enough” cultures, and 100 percent cultures. Each one affects your school’s ability to help all students succeed.
Toxic Cultures
For some schools, the culture is toxic. In many cases, that toxicity is out in the open. There’s a lot of in-fighting and open resistance from the staff, as well as a pervasive “us versus them” attitude between staff and administration. This tension often extends to interactions with students and families and can even affect the way that students interact with staff and their peers.
However, sometimes the toxicity lurks beneath the surface. It manifests in gossip, cliques, passive-aggressive resistance, and a subtle but persistent distrust among administration, staff, students, and families. Whether the toxicity is out in the open or hidden beneath the surface, a toxic culture is more focused on individual complaints and grievances than on supporting students and helping them succeed.
That’s the challenge with toxic cultures. People are more focused on self-preservation than on serving their students. I’ve seen staff refusing to offer students support when the students struggle because they’re mad at the way their administrators rolled out the curriculum and they want to prove it’s ineffective. I’ve seen administrators creating school schedules designed to punish certain teachers even though that schedule puts students at a disadvantage. As the African proverb goes, “When the elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers.” The petty skirmishes of the adults make the students collateral damage. Over time, this toxicity creates an increasingly stressful and unhealthy environment for both staff and students.
“Good Enough” Cultures
Many schools sustain “good enough” cultures, which, although less openly dangerous, can be insidious nonetheless. That’s because “good enough” cultures are functional for the most part. Everyone works hard for students, often to the point of experiencing burnout. And everyone (with a few exceptions) usually gets along. In fact, many “good enough” cultures consider themselves like a family.
However, here’s the danger: Although everyone in a “good enough” culture remains focused on student success, they’ve accepted that not all students will succeed. They continue to repeat the mantra, “Every kid, every day, no matter what,” but they also admit that “you can’t save them all.”
So, “good enough” cultures set goals that feel attainable and focus on building incremental gains, all while rationalizing that, in spite of their best efforts, poverty, trauma, and other issues outside their control will always prevent some students from being successful. Their only hope is to do the best they can. Thus, “good enough” cultures normalize student failure, seeing it as logical, even expected. As long as they’re passing some students, “good enough” cultures accept that others will fail.
There are only three types of school cultures—toxic cultures, “good enough” cultures, and 100 percent cultures.
100% Cultures
The third culture I’ve seen—and the one all schools should aspire to—is the 100 percent culture. These cultures relentlessly focus on helping every student succeed. Although people may disagree about how they’ll achieve 100 percent success, they’re all fully committed to the vision and work consistently toward achieving it.
What’s really powerful about these cultures is that they don’t demand conformity to be successful. You can be unwavering about the vision while remaining flexible about the details. 100 percent cultures are not about forcing everyone into a cookie-cutter practice. Instead, they unleash creativity and empower everyone to find ways to help all students succeed. And because everyone is invited to solve the challenges of achieving 100 percent student success, everyone feels accountable for the outcomes.
100 percent cultures simply don’t accept that some students will always fail. They’re vigilant about eliminating barriers to student success, and they work tirelessly to find ways to reach every child. They don’t chase incremental gains. Sure, they celebrate wins, but they don’t stop working until they normalize student success and make student failure the anomaly.
Becoming a 100% Culture
Shifting to a 100 percent culture is straightforward. It just requires three things: clarity, confidence, and competence.
Clarity
The first step is to set a 100 percent vision that spells out the success you’ll promise for every student you serve. This vision isn’t just lip service. It offers everyone a clear, unequivocal goal, so there’s no way to rationalize the failure of even one student. Clarity is important because “success” will mean something different to everyone.
Unfortunately, most visions contain a lot of platitudes. Consider a typical vision: “Every student will meet their full academic potential in a rigorous learning environment and become a global citizen prepared to navigate a 21st century society while making a valuable contribution to their community.” What does it mean for a student “to reach their full potential”? What counts as a “rigorous learning environment”? What is a “global citizen”? How will you know whether a student can “successfully navigate a 21st century society,” and, while we’re at it, what is a 21st century society anyway? What counts as a “valuable contribution” to the community? Although this vision seems to be saying a lot, in reality it’s so vague that you have no idea what you’re shooting for or whether you ever achieve it.
Now compare that vision with some of the visions that principals I’ve worked with have created:
- “100 percent of students will meet proficient or above in reading and mathematics.”
- “100 percent of students will earn all their course credits with a grade of 70 percent or higher each semester.”
- “100 percent of students will graduate enlisted, enrolled, or employed.”
Notice how clear those visions are? There’s no room for misinterpretation, which means that everyone works toward the same goal.
For Tosha-Lyn, this was all it took to shift her culture. When she first assumed the principalship of her middle school, the culture was pretty toxic. After years of failure, the staff was beaten down and despondent. They had lost their passion for the work and were starting to blame the students.
But once Tosha-Lyn shared her vision that 100 percent of students would be proficient or above in reading and math, things started to shift. Her staff embraced the clarity of her vision and grabbed onto the hope it offered. It gave their work new focus and a sense of urgency. The more they aligned their efforts around the vision, the more successful they became. Even when the pandemic struck, their 100 percent culture was undaunted. They stuck to their focus, and while all the schools around them were experiencing learning loss, they doubled their reading proficiency and quintupled their math proficiency.
That’s the power of having a clear vision. It gives everyone a decisive focus and creates a true sense of urgency. The more you align everything to your vision, the more your culture remains focused on what’s truly important.
Confidence
It may seem strange that building confidence is so crucial to a 100 percent culture, especially when confidence feels like an individual characteristic rather than a crucial cultural component. But if your staff doesn’t believe that 100 percent student success is possible, they won’t pursue it.
One of the biggest challenges to confidence is that many staff members have heard others pay lip service to the idea of “all means all” while still pursuing tiny incremental goals that leave a wide swath of students behind. They may feel cynical about the idea of 100 percent success or simply become complacent over time because vague visions have no sense of urgency.
You can overcome their cynicism and complacency by, first of all, being consistent. If you really mean 100 percent success, you must hold yourself and your school accountable to achieving it over the long term. Align everything in your school to support your 100 percent vision. Build your master schedule to achieve it, realign your discipline policy to support it, and reexamine your grading and reporting policy to reflect it.
Second, you need to build teachers’ capacity. Many teachers won’t have either the skill or the will required to achieve your vision—without those, they can quickly become frustrated and give up. If you give them the feedback and support they need, you can patiently build their capacity to achieve the vision and, by doing so, build their individual and collective confidence that they’re capable of 100 percent student success.
You can begin by homing in on the specific skills teachers need. Instead of a one-size-fits-all strategy, meet with each teacher individually and determine ONE skill they need to work on right now if they’re going to help all their students succeed. One teacher might need to check for understanding before moving on to the next topic to ensure students are with them. Another teacher may need to focus on doing a better job of connecting all learning activities to the learning objective. Focus on the ONE skill a teacher can develop that will make the biggest difference in their ability to help every student achieve your 100 percent vision. Offer the teacher continued feedback and support on the skill until they show growth in that area.
To build teachers’ will, provide them with support and encouragement as they work on their ONE skill. For those teachers who are motivated by the need to master their craft, for example, being intentional about creating small victories can keep them motivated over the long term. For those driven by a sense of purpose, you might continually remind them how the day-to-day work helps them achieve the bigger “why” of the vision.
When elementary school principal Francina introduced her vision that 100 percent of students would be proficient or above in reading and math, she faced both a skill and a will problem with her teachers. Although she was not a new principal, she was new to the school, and the teachers were solidly invested in their “good enough” culture. They were a decent school and, although their test scores were slipping, they were still in the middle of the pack compared to other schools in their district. What’s more, because past principals had told most of the teachers that they were doing a pretty good job, the teachers weren’t interested in hearing their new principal say otherwise.
Francina began by tackling their will. Instead of presenting her vision as a new initiative, she connected it to the teachers’ personal aspirations and desires for students. By crafting a compelling story that put teachers at the center of achieving this vision, she showed them how it would help fulfill their own goals for their students. That made teachers at least open to considering that they could achieve 100 percent success. Next, she aligned everything they did as a school to that vision. For example, instead of remediating every single skill students were missing, teachers focused on the key skills students needed to be successful with upcoming lessons. Because the teachers saw that the vision wasn’t just another unsupported mandate, they developed confidence in their ability to achieve 100 percent student success.
Francina also started working on growing the teachers’ skills. As a first step to achieving her 100 percent vision, she suggested that each teacher try to help every student reach their stretch goals. She used ONE skill feedback to help each teacher identify the most important thing they needed to work on. Some teachers needed to focus on differentiating instruction so students had multiple pathways to success. Others needed to focus on giving more frequent formative assessments to ensure students were making progress and to adjust their instruction accordingly.
This singular focus on improving one key teaching skill helped teachers show considerable growth throughout the school year, so much so that at the end of the year, her school scored the highest year-to-year growth in their district in reading and math at every grade level. Once teachers experienced this huge win, their confidence went through the roof. Now all of them are on board and are working diligently toward helping every student achieve their 100 percent vision.
100 percent cultures relentlessly focus on helping every student succeed.
Competence
You’ve worked on clarity and confidence. The last thing you need to do is build your organizational competence—your ability as a school to deliver on your promise for all students. It’s less about any one individual’s skill and will and more about how you work together as a team. To achieve organizational competence, you really only need to focus on three key areas.
First, you need a clear plan for how you’ll achieve your vision. I’m not talking about an elaborate, multipage school improvement plan that includes multiple goals, a bunch of data, and 437 different steps to take. Instead, ask yourself this: What one or two things can we do as a school that, if we did nothing else but those things, would achieve our 100 percent vision? Then create a simple one-page plan that charts your path to success. This plan should identify a few specific, high-impact practices that your school commits to implementing consistently.
Next, you need a team architecture that supports your plan. We often default to whatever team structure we inherited. Many schools have a team leader, but these positions are often awarded on the basis of who has been at your school the longest or who wants the job. The team structure may come to reflect the strengths and interests of that leader. Instead, the team should be based on the needs of the school, on what will best support the work.
Finally, you need consistent execution of your plan which, frankly, is easier said than done. We often start out with grand ideas for how we’ll achieve our vision, and then we get distracted once life gets in the way. The best way to stay consistent is to put structures in place that keep the work going even when you get distracted. One of the most powerful tools I know for doing this is a daily and weekly meeting rhythm. Although most of us dread having another meeting to attend, meeting with your team each week to review your goals, examine your data, work together to solve persistent challenges, and set clear objectives for the following week keeps everyone focused on your vision and plan. In addition, meeting for just 15 minutes each day to check in and see that everyone is still on track is a great way to ensure that everyone stays focused on the larger weekly goals in spite of the day-to-day distractions.
For Scott, this was the key to shifting his culture from a “good enough” culture to a 100 percent culture. For years, he had been frustrated as a principal that he wasn’t doing more to help his middle school. He would look at the incremental gains the school was making each year and ask himself, “Is this really all there is?” But once he chose his 100 percent vision, his teachers immediately embraced it. They began to identify the institutional barriers that were keeping them from helping every student succeed. First, they reexamined how they made their decisions, and they streamlined the process so they could make better decisions more quickly. For example, they used to hold the typical leadership team meetings where they endlessly rehearsed problems until they finally voted on a course of action, usually a version of what they had always done before. Now they use a streamlined agenda that helps them quickly surface and prioritize their most pressing challenges, come to a rapid consensus about a course of action, and ensure that each team member takes accountability for getting the work done.
Next, they started looking for what I call “accountability leaks”—systems that were incomplete or inconsistently implemented—and started closing those leaks. For instance, they hadn’t revisited their cell phone policy in years; not only was it outdated, but it also hadn’t been enforced uniformly across all classrooms. They created a new policy, carefully onboarding teachers and students and consistently tracking the policy each week during their streamlined leadership team meetings. As a result, they eliminated cell phone issues in their school in a matter of months.
It wasn’t long before Scott’s school culture shifted. Instead of being satisfied with the status quo, the teachers began to see every decision through the lens of 100 percent student success, and the systems they established together helped them make continuous progress toward their goals.
You Have the Power to Shift Culture
“The fish rots from the head.” That’s one of my favorite sayings. It means that if a culture is rotten, it starts with the person in charge. But the opposite is also true. 100 percent cultures start with the people at the head. You have the power to shift your current culture. Whether it’s a toxic or a “good enough” culture, principals can shift any culture into a 100 percent culture by building clarity in your vision, confidence in your team, and competence in your organization.
Reflect & Discuss
➛ Reflect on your current school culture. Would you classify it as toxic, “good enough,” or a 100 percent culture? Why?
➛ How does the vision at your school compare to the clear examples provided in the article?
➛ How do you build confidence in your team’s ability to achieve 100 percent student success?
Stop Leading, Start Building
Administrators, it's time to make the shift from leadership to buildership. Get ready to turn your school into a success story.
