Imagine a gardener who sees row upon row of beautiful flowers in the nursery. He enthusiastically loads a basket to overflowing with annuals and perennials in anticipation of placing each new plant in a special place in the garden. The nursery salesperson is encouraging, explaining that these flowers are special hybrid varieties that research has shown will do well in the local climate. But on arriving home, the gardener faces an unpleasant reality: his garden is full of thistles, crabgrass, dandelions, and other weeds. Here are some choices the gardener might consider:

• Drop the new plants at the threshold of the garden and leave them there, hoping that delivering the plants close to the intended location will be sufficient.
• Plant the new flowers between the weeds, hoping that the nutrients in the soil will support both.
• Give the new plants a stern lecture about "growing smarter" and making wiser use of the available nutrients.
• Pull the weeds. Then, and only then, plant the flowers.

Although the last choice may seem like nothing more than common sense, it is decidedly uncommon in schools. Every education system has weeds. There is not a school district, a school, a department, an office, a job description, or a program that does not have a least a few. If we fail to pull the weeds, we can anticipate conversations like these:

• "We'll have professional learning communities—just as soon as we finish making announcements at the faculty meeting."
• "We'll do common scoring of student work—just as soon as all members of the teaching team finish their parent conferences and discipline reports."
• "We're happy to embrace 'writing across the curriculum'—just as soon as we finish covering a curriculum that has never yet been completed within the school year."

Try this simple experiment. Ask your colleagues to list the initiatives and programs that your school has started within the past five years. Then ask them to list the initiatives and programs that have been discontinued as the result of careful evaluation and weeding. I have never been in a school where the first list is not significantly longer than the second.

Educators are drowning under the weight of initiative fatigue— attempting to use the same amount of time, money, and emotional energy to accomplish more and more objectives. That strategy, fueled by various mixtures of adrenaline, enthusiasm, and intimidation, might work in the short term. But eventually, each initiative added to the pile creates a dramatic decline in organizational effectiveness. As the academic growing season continues, we should not be surprised when some of the new flowers are choked by the omnipresent weeds.

Fortunately, there is an answer to initiative fatigue, and that is the common sense of the gardener. The strategic leader must have a "garden party" to pull the weeds before planting the flowers.

Some school principals have a simple rule—they will introduce no new program until they remove at least one or two existing activities, plans, units, or other time-consumers. These principals have time during faculty meetings for collaborative scoring of student work because they stopped making announcements at such meetings and committed every possible administrative communication to e-mail or written notes instead. Teachers have time for students to do more writing in science and social studies because a team of educators identified the standards that matter the most (Ainsworth, 2003) and made a deliberate decision not to engage in frantic and ineffective coverage of the entire text. Faculty teams make a game of it, finding weeds that seemed small when they started but that collectively were robbing students and teachers of one of their most precious resources—time.

Of course, one person's weed may be another person's flower. Moreover, intense accountability pressures can create a situation in which teachers believe that if a topic might be on the state test, then they must be able to show an accusing administrator that their class covered the topic. Although Marzano, Kendall, and Cicchinelli(1999) demonstrated that adequate coverage of many states' standards would require more than twice the number of classroom hours than are typically available, many schools steadfastly refuse to discard anything—or at least to admit that they do. Thus we are left with curriculum by default; we proceed at a moderate pace through the fall, pick it up to a canter by the winter, gallop through the spring, and still have material left at the end of the year that we did not have time to cover.

Research and common sense make it clear that initiative fatigue is rife in schools. We must identify some things we can stop doing. To begin the weeding process, consider the following three ideas.

1. Use intergrade dialogue to find the essentials. Ask me as a 3rd grade teacher what I am willing to give up, and I may say, "Nothing! Everything I do is important!" But ask the same 3rd grade teacher to tell a colleague in 2nd grade what 2nd grade students should know and be able to do in order to enter the 3rd grade with confidence and success, and the 3rd grade teacher will provide a list that is brief, balanced, and precise. I have asked this question of hundreds of teachers, and not a single time has one said, "For students to enter my 3rd grade classroom confidently next year, the 2nd grade teacher must cover every single state standard." Rather, the teachers giving advice to their colleagues in the next-lower grades provide specific and succinct advice. Entire school districts can conduct this exercise, and they will find high levels of agreement on the essentials, casting doubt on the necessity of some of the more idiosyncratic elements of the curriculum.
2. Sweat the small stuff. We can recover hours of valuable instruction time when teachers share their best time-saving tips. Within the same school, some teachers have transitions among centers that require almost five minutes, while their colleague across the hall accomplishes the same transition in under 20 seconds. Some secondary teachers collect homework as students walk in the door, saving several minutes of classroom time. Some elementary schools have fewer but longer science periods so that teachers lose a smaller percentage of class time setting up and taking down labs. Some technology teachers ensure that every computer is turned on and ready for log-in before students enter the room. These small matters take seconds or minutes during the day, but collectively they amount to exceptionally large time savings.
3. Set the standard for a weed-free garden. Respect the time of teachers: start and end meetings on time, never make routine announcements aloud, and cancel or shorten meetings that are not contributing to student achievement. If leaders will not pull the schoolwide weeds in meetings, conferences, and interruptions, they can hardly ask teachers to weed the classroom gardens.

Leaders at every level might want to try this experiment. At the next gathering of educators, raise your right hand and take the pledge: "I will not ask you to implement one more initiative until we first take some things off the table." Then listen. It might be the first round of applause you've had in a while.